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Film really does change my mindset when shooting.


rpavich

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I know folks talk about how shooting film changes the way they think of shooting but it just hit home with me.

 

I'm a digital shooter also, I have a great rangefinder (In addition to my M6) that I love; an Epson R-D1x, so it's not either/or for me.

 

However, I just realized something about how shooting film affects my shooting habits; I shoot differently with my M6 than I do with my Digi-cam.

 

For example, I was out walking to my wife's work this morning at sunrise to give myself a chance to shoot some images on the way (something I've done dozens of times) but this time I found that I was waiting for the light to be right; I wasn't just shooting scenes that "might be good" but ones that (in my mind) seemed to be interesting and would look good in B&W. Whereas before I might shoot a dozen frames while walking and possibly none might even be good enough to convert to B&W to "see if it's good" this time I waited and waited for the light to come over the tree line and cast some interesting shadows and such before I pulled the trigger at all. I even saw a doe and her fawns on my street and sat down and waited until they forgot me and began to dart across the street in front of me. Before I'd have just shot a few images in different poses and chose the best one.

It's not that film is more expensive per shot (though it is) it's that I know that when I pull the trigger, that's just the beginning of making an image happen, there is a LOT more work involved and I'll be darned if I'm going to waste my time developing, scanning and then culling an image in lightroom that I know will probably be mediocre at best...it's a complete waste of time.

That's a good thing, and I hadn't realized that it was happening until just this morning.

So far I'm on roll #2 and loving the process. I'm learning a bunch and having fun.

By the way; my wife has polaroid 600 and this is me with her Zorki 4 and my M6 just clowning around.
 

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Nothing focuses the mind as much as knowing there are only 36 exposures in the roll.

 

Or 12, for the same cost, if not more - for both the film and the development :)

I totally agree with the OP. This is my experience with film also. It really helps me being very selective. I do absolutely not understand the people who run around shooting 10 rolls of film a week. What a hassle to deal with. I usually finish 1 roll a week normally, maybe 2 if I'm doing something out of the ordinary, and I think that's plenty. My keeper rate has gone up drastically per exposure, and I'm treating the images and scans with much more care than I've ever done to any digital file that I've made.

 

Sometimes I miss digital however. I feel bad about having the M240 sit in the shelf barely used. I make a few frames with it, that I'm totally satisfied with, but they just don't give me the same feeling as handling my film strips. And the B&W conversions from the M240 can never live up to the B&W film I shoot with, no matter how much processing time I put into the raw files. Acros 100, HP5+ @ 800 with a yellow filter, and my new favorite - Rollei RPX 100 @ 100 easily beats any digital raw file B&W conversion that I've made. And it's such an enjoyment to not have to decide on the look of an image, and rather leave that to the film and processing, and decide in advance rather than fiddling with sliders in LR/PS later.

Edited by indergaard
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