I found a few photos that I developed myself in high school when I was 17. I used an Olympus Trip 35mm camera, Ilford HP5 film, and Ilford photographic paper. I still vividly remember taking this photograph as well as the developing and printing process in a small room under the school staircase. A few friends and I had a small, informal photography club, helped by our Chemistry teacher.

I was at Peets coffee shop this afternoon and found out that sitting on one side of me was a wedding photographer working up some images on his laptop, and on the other was a professional photographer who takes seascapes and architectural photos. When you hang a Leica around your neck it attracts the attention of those who are in the know and it makes a great ice-breaker.

The seascape photographer has his very nice photos at jamesdewrance.com if you want to take a look. The wedding photographer, who’s name I didn’t get, volunteered to hold a reflector for me so I could take a photo of Kaori in the window light. I’ll post it if it’s any good once the film is developed.

I decided to enable the no- right-click plugin for WordPress so that no-one can use a right-click to copy my images. I don’t need to protect my income by making sure no-one is using my images, but I don’t particularly want other people using them without asking for permission first.

You can do a Google search for an image by dropping the image onto the image search box. I tried that with an image and found it in a few places on the Deviant Art website, but it was linked to my original image, which is okay. It’s also possible to put an invisible digital watermark on images using a service such as that offered by digimarc. Your image, and derivatives of it, can be more easily tracked with a digital watermark.

I’ve been using my digital camera as a light meter to get the exposure settings right before taking photos with my Yashica TLR camera. This means that I have some identical photos in digital and film, and they make an interesting comparison.

Here’s the roof of the Singapore cloud dome in digital:

And here it is in medium format film:

Obviously, the medium format photo is much taller creating the feeling that you can walk into the picture. My initial reaction was that I liked the lighter more open look of the digital version better. But then when I look at the depth of the color and texture of the film version, I’ve come to prefer the film. I can see the detail of the joint welds in the film version and it somehow has the nostalgic feel of a color photo in an old library book. Film has a wider dynamic range than digital which means that it captures more tones. I added some contrast to the digital photo in Lightroom, but it still doesn’t match the depth of tone in the film version. The film version also captures much more resolution than the film camera because the sensor (the film) is so much bigger than the sensor in the digital camera.

Digital is very accurate and clinical, but film has soul.

A collection of color photos taken with a Yashica Mat 124G medium format film camera.