There was a recent meme that criticized photographers of the pen tool generation in Photoshop. It personifies us as old ladies with pedestrians being escorted out by the younger generation with their AI tools. In the comments section, someone commented: “Let’s see how these young men will survive the 1999 version of Photoshop.”
I laugh so much that I wonder if I’m transitioning into the “back in the day” age. I reapplied the anti-wrinkle cream as I added the comment, “and a film camera! They will never survive.” Well, give me the walker because in my day, taking successful photos was not easy. Here are three ways that starting film photography helped me become a better digital photographer.
Being a typical penniless college student means I have to be very careful in how I spend my money. In my film photography class, printing even one photo costs a lot of money. First is the cost of the film, then the cost of the liquid to develop the film. Then comes the big killer: the newspaper. Each sheet costs about 1 USD. Mind you, this $1 is when gas prices are $0.98/gallon and the minimum wage is $5.15/hour. So printing even one image costs a little money. With an academic scholarship and working morning and night to make a living, I really couldn’t afford to take bad photos. It’s simply too expensive. After a few failed shots and watching my money run out, here are three lessons I quickly learned.
1. Starting film photography forced me to carefully compose my shots by looking at the edges of the frame
When taking photos, people often look at the “active space” in their photos: the main subject. It can be a person or an object. I often see photographers taking photos without considering the edges of the frame or negative space. For example, when they saw the photo pop up on the LCD screen, they suddenly saw a soda can leaning against the wall in the background. When I’m filming, I don’t want to pay $4 to see that can. I quickly learned to look around my image, quickly checking the four sides of the frame before taking the photo. Looking at negative space as well as positive space when taking photos is a great habit to adopt and will save you time in post-processing.
2. Starting film photography taught me how to capture highlights
Many digital photographers know this rule, but if you’ve ever shot film, you’ll get really annoyed at overexposing your highlights. Nowadays, we have such pixel-rich images, we can pull back our highlights more easily. When developing film, you must cut a piece of translucent paper and attach it to a string. You must then quickly move the device back and forth over the overexposed portion to block light from reaching the print while the rest of the image receives light to develop. You can see it done here at the 4 minute mark on the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrCifRniOcs
After repeating that process several times and throwing away those $1 sheets of paper one by one, you’ve learned how to quickly expose your highlights correctly.
While you can more easily get the highlights back with the RAW images we have now, if you lose the highlights and try to bring them back it can result in an HDR image unrealistic. I see this a lot in landscape photos where photographers blow out the sky and try to bring it back in post. The easiest image to work with is one that is exposed for highlight. If you have dark areas in your image, you can easily lighten those areas without affecting color or image quality. If you overexpose, highlights will show up in your final photo.
3. Starting film photography taught me to plan my photo shoots in advance
In the digital age, if it’s a week where I’m just overwhelmed by life and struggling, it’s rare that I walk into my factory, pick up the product, and just “start playing.” What usually happens is an hour or two of taking pictures that aren’t up to my standards, stopping shooting, grabbing my notebook, and tackling the ideation process properly products, thinking, looking at competing brands, taking notes, sketching ideas and planning the shoot I may or may not need to pick up a few props and start over the next day. When I do it right, which is how I do it most of the time, I plan out the entire day of shooting before I pick up my camera the day before and have everything planned and laid out Have a successful day.
Whether you are a product photographer, landscape photographer or portrait photographer, planning your photo shoot will always lead to a more successful outcome. It could mean researching the market and finding ways to create an image that doesn’t exist in that space. It might mean researching the wedding area or driving through the Saturday before the scheduled portrait session. This will allow you to see where the light is hitting and get inspired to get the best shots you can get at 2:30pm with that dreaded afternoon sun. There’s nothing worse than choosing a location for a portrait session and realizing when you get there that the sun won’t give you the look you want in that space. With film photography, we really don’t have the luxury of taking dozens of photos before deciding “it doesn’t work.” The development process itself took hours for one roll of film. You must have an actionable plan before you begin. Taking steps to plan your photo shoot in advance will result in better photos and be a more efficient use of your time in the digital age.
Of course, you don’t need to have any experience with film photography to become a talented digital photographer. There are many self-taught digital photographers around the world who create much more impressive work than me. But whatever your background, I hope that these three tips will help you take more successful photos and reduce post-processing time.
As always, my favorite part of my posts is the comments section. Have you started taking film photos? What valuable lessons did you learn from that background? Do you look at your negative space before taking a photo? If not, I hope this is a habit you will adopt. Let me know your experiences and thoughts in the comments section.
