Before leaving university, I really wanted to milk out any possible additional skills I could gain that would be useful to me moving forward, and I’ve taken it upon myself to pick up film photography processes and have that as a skill. It is super fun and something that I can look forward to in addition to my project. I also felt that it was well suited to my project, which is all about slowing down and embracing a simpler life of less consumption, and I wanted that to reflect through the techniques I used to produce the project, making it more authentic and deliberate.
I attended a few workshops throughout January to learn film developing techniques, and following my trip to Mallorca where I got lots of juicy b&w shots, I was ready to take it to the next level. I was originally planning on signing up to a workshop where the negatives would be transferred onto paper to produce a physical print picture, which would be cool… however, considering that my project won’t be a photo album, it seemed a bit redundant and unnecessary. My project is fully digital so my photography, even though on film, also needs to be digitised. So instead, I attended a negative scanning workshop where I learned to use the Epson film scanner to digitise the negatives so that I can use them across my website, portfolio, and sketchbook.
Although I enjoyed the process of practising film photography, and I loved the outcomes, for digital use it is perhaps not the best. I do not enjoy the poor quality of the final outcome, and it does not look polished enough for final results. It takes a lot of post-production editing to try to make the pictures look sharper, but it still does not look as good as it would if the picture was just of higher quality. Perhaps it was the camera I used or something throughout the process. I would love to carry on with film photography throughout my entire project; however, it is extremely time-consuming, poor quality, and costly for this busy final project.