Lately I have been discussing film with young photographers. Development, metering light… The basics. It seems simple enough, but having lived through “The Negative Era,” there is much more to it. To me, the most important thing before clicking the shutter is to visualize the end result.
The discussion usually turns into me sounding like a hundred-year-old grandpa, saying shit like… “When I was a kid, we didn’t have fancy cameras that we could just look on the back image monitor and not have to know anything.” I reflect back on how many decisions went into making a particular photograph. “Is the image going to be black and white or color? What film will I use? What iso? Will I under or over expose it in camera? Will I push or pull the exposure in the development? What brand of paper will I print it on, and what finish will it have?” It was like winning the lottery when a decent image made it through the gauntlet. In Lightroom, it is possible now to have VSCO which has every film stock ever made at your fingertips. The random clicking of presets without having any clue about the film stocks is an epidemic. When I was shooting film I had a “look.” Every photographer did. You could look at say… “Carlos Serrao,” and know it was a Carlos image just by the way it was lit, the tones and the printing. I feel like the same should hold true today. My go-tos were Kodak 160 NC, 400 NC and Portra 800 for color and Tri X 400 and Ilford Delta 3200 for black and white. Of course there were others, but these were the ones that gave me my signature look.
My film cameras of choice were the Mamiya RZ67 and the Mamiya 645. I sometimes used a Hasselblad if I was feeling artsy and wanted the square negative.
To check the image, (exposure, lighting, etc.,) I interchanged the film back on the camera with a Polaroid back. It went something like this… (Keep in mind this was usually done on a set with art directors and many people looking over your shoulder.) The assistant metered the shot and yelled out some settings for the Polaroid, which is mostly 100 ISO. I would shoot it at a third stop-over, then pull the Polaroid from the back of the camera and stick it under my arm to develop for 90 seconds. If the polaroid looked good then we would do some math. The film speed would more than likely be different from the Polaroid speed so we had to know how to adjust the f-stop and shutter speed to compensate. If we made a mistake, then we did it all over again. Those 90 seconds seemed like an eternity. Then we would fold the finished polaroid to crop it and tell the art director “It won’t be blurry on film. The film is a faster ISO.” Hopefully they understood that shit, which wasn’t always the case.
Sometimes we would mix in Polaroid 665 which gives a black and white negative. You would shoot the photo, pull the paper apart and take away a sticky negative that would need to go in a small bucket of water until you could get home and fix. This was perfect for band shoots to throw in a different vibe.
Unlike a negative or digital file which is easy to reproduce, a Polaroid is more of a one off. Good or bad- it’s a moment in time.
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