Please excuse my upcoming geek moment 🙂  What you are about to read might be a bit technical but I promise I will make it fun 🙂
About 2 years ago I decided to do something completely crazy and buy a old film camera and have a little fun with the world of film again.  I began my career as a photographer shooting film and when digital became all the rage I sold all my film cameras and dove into the future head on!  Digital was great with it’s instant feedback on the back of the camera and it made learning faster!  Great!  Right?  Well over the years I continued to learning my craft, met some super fabulous people, and realized that I had found my calling.  The only problem was – the last few years I have been starting to feel like my art was missing something. I was thoroughly enjoying every wedding & family session but there was still a small creative hole forming.  I think I was cruising good ole Facebook one day and I found a group that was dedicated to film photography called Film Is Not Dead (or FIND) .  The Gentleman who it belonged to – Jonathan Canlas – has NEVER switched over to the digital age – he has always shot film.  (If you haven’t heard of Jonathan or seen his work PLEASE go check it out!  His work is AMAZING!!)  Jonathan said that he tried a few times to switch but just could never do it.  I thought “Wow!  Sounds like fun!”  Like getting back to your roots.  So I picked up an inexpensive 35mm Canon Elan 7N – which was great because it used some of my current digital lenses so I didn’t have to invest much – SCORE!!  Next I grabbed my mini-model Sophia, and headed out to the back yard one day just to mess around and see what came of it!  Sophia was her usual nutty self – which always makes for great photographs – and it was really exciting shooting photo’s and not being able to see them right away!  I know that sounds completely crazy but I found I was watching my settings more carefully and really paying attention to my subject instead of rattling off a few 100 shots and praying I was going to get 1.
Next came the waiting – NOT the fun part I might add.  I don’t wait well – patience is not my strong point sometimes 🙂  I tell you what though – scan day (the day my digital scans of my developed film come in my email) is my favorite day of the week!  I got the photo’s back from that day out in the back yard and I was BLOWN away!!!  For those that know me, I am a MAJOR black & white fan!  WARNING GEEK MOMENT – This was just cheep film shot on an inexpensive camera and it had the best tones I had seen in a long time!  And trust me, I had been looking at 100’s of 1000’s of digital images that had been converted with some preset or another for 6 years.  It reminded me of the photo’s that my mother used to take of my sisters and I growing up!  It looked like real life to me!  I was hooked!  That creative hole that I felt had been forming for a while – I think I had found a fix for it.
Over the last 2 years I have furthered my film photography education and am now shooting lots of film for lots of clients and of course for myself 🙂  I feel fulfilled as a photographer and an artist.  It makes me truly happy to do what I do and I hope that it makes my clients happy too!  Above all that geek stuff I just though out – all I really want to do is give my clients something truly special – well captured, unique, beautiful images for them to cherish 🙂
This was that 1st roll of film – please excuse my nut of a child – she’s mine and I love her 🙂
a kid and her dog
