Analogue Baby

As some of you know, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world way back in November. Fast forward almost four months, we have a tiny little person that is finding her vocal cords.

Years ago my parents got me a roll of Ilford FP4 film for Christmas and it’s more or less been the only black and white film I’ve used since then. For colour I have some Fuji Velvia and Kodak Ektar kicking around that, after this little project, might be used sooner rather than later.

The tricky thing with film nowadays is the processing. Since digital has taken over, finding a place to process film can be challenging. Luckily there’s Old School Photo Lab located in Dover, New Hampshire. They’re a fantastic little lab where I’m going to be a customer for life. You send them your film, they process it, print it (if you want), and even offer high-res scans. Processing and scanning for this roll was something like $22 USD. Totally reasonable.

Anyhow, I recently shot a roll of black and white film of our daughter. I keep my stocks in my freezer and for quite a while wanted to use one on her. I don’t shoot a lot of film, but occasionally it’s a fun little thing to do that requires you to think just a little bit more before you shoot. By that I mean you can’t really just blast off a bunch of frames knowing that if one doesn’t turn out, surely there’ll be a few others that did. Even when shooting digital I’ve really tried to limit myself and make sure I don’t overshoot things even if I can shoot hundreds upon hundreds of photos in a day. I’m not saying don’t shoot a lot. My point is that you need to shoot with purpose; don’t take photos for the sake of taking photos.

I like the pace of shooting film; it’s calming and stressless. You don’t get the instant gratification that digital offers and, to me, it makes seeing the results that much better. You’ve got a finite amount of frames to use up with film. In this case, I had 36 exposures, not a 32 GB memory card.