For the past few months I have been taking a photography class on B/W Film Photography. I have thoroughly enjoyed the entire class and have definitely exponentially expanded my photographic skill base and knowledge pool. I am also beginning to understand what it means to have an expensive pastime. With cooking, you can always buy food cheaper or go to markets to get better deals, and even when that doesn't work, you can also just work with random stuff you have. However, that is not the case with photography. Especially when shooting film, the equipment (cameras and lenses), the medium (rolls of film), and the product (either computer programmes or photosensitive paper) becomes very expensive very quickly. It is possible to cut corners and such, but those "cost-saving measures" become very apparent, very fast.
However, for one of the first times in my life, I think I have really found a hobby - something that I feel okay spending inordinate amounts of my time (and money) on doing. On that interesting note, I started the class with one camera a 30+ year old Canon AE-1 with 50mm kit lens that belonged to my father, a flash that didn't work, a few filters, a 2x teleconverter, and a broken 75-210mm lens and now I own four camera bodies (two Canon AE-1, a Minolta X-700, and a Minolta SRT 101) four 50mm kit lenses a 28mm F2.8, 49mm F2.8, 135 F2.8 400mm F2.8 28-70mm F3.5-4.5, 75-210 F3.5, 85-205mm F2.8-5.4, 60-300mm F3.4-5.4, three 2x teleconverters, 4 flashes, an inordinate amount/variety of filters, two camera covers, three camera bags, a set of special glass magnifying filters, a mini-tripod, and three triggers. The best part about this is though family gifts and an amazing deal on Craigslist, I got everything I own for $120.
But back to the class, throughout the past few months I have been very busy doing work for it and trying to force my way through the learning curve for printing film. I have learned the hard way about all the various finicky aspects of film (light leaks, camera malfunctions, film inserted the backwards) and have spent countless hours reshooting and reshooting my projects. That being said, I have enjoyed every minute of it.
There is such an indescribable joy about walking out of a dark room after an entire night spent working with the perfect print in one hand and being greeted by the sun rising through the windows. It was those long nights that really made the class so worth it for me and because of that — even though it stole my life, even though I was always running around, and even though it is expensive — there is no way I will stop shooting film and taking classes.
The final assignment for the class was actually to upload all of the projects that I did during the class, with their accompanying statements. Additionally, what I decided to do was to upload all of my negatives that I didn't print for the projects to really round out my photographic journey.
The links to all of these can be found below.
In the end, looking back at the beginning of the class I came in thinking that I really knew photography even though all I had was trial-and-error and a good deal of intuition. Now that I have finished I have since discovered that those two are extremely important, but only one small part of a very big puzzle; More than anything, I have just re-enforced my belief that you can and should never stop learning, no matter what you're doing.
PROJECTS:
In all of these links you will find the various projects that I did for the class. Each one shows all of the final printed images and the negative scans from the projects, as well contains a link to the rest of the project negatives.
