(top - Bill Peck, official guitarist at the time for Parker Guitars, in Miami in 2002)

(bottom - Miami DJ Ivano Bellini at Space in 2001)

I read today that Paris Hilton is supposedly training to become a house DJ as we speak. She’s been spotted hanging out with Afrojack, Chuckie, and Deadmau5 and secretly receiving training from them or others. On a Talk Nightlife thread, one of our contributors referred in a roundabout way that Traktor is the root of the issue of her being a DJ. 

Now, I’m not one to fault anyone for getting into the DJ profession, but a lot of DJs don’t consider you a “real” DJ unless you cut your teeth on vinyl records and a pair of 1200s. 

Which makes me wonder about the newer generation of photographers out there which have never worked or enjoyed the wonders of film? The photos above of Bill and Ivano were shot on film. Fujicolor Press 400 for the Bill on and Kodak Gold 400 for Ivano.

Don’t get me wrong, I love shooting digital. Shooting with my current 5D MK II body is nothing short of miraculous. The overall technology is nearly three years old, but Canon outdid themselves in making a body which still holds it’s own today and will for a long time (in the digital realm) to come. It satisfies my instant-gratification reflex. And also digital sensors now outclass 35mm color negative (and most reversal) film by a wide margin.

However, it obviously wasn’t always that way. I shot film for a long time. From my first experiments with bulk-loaded B&W Arista in 1993 (high school photo class, rocking the K1000) to crazy filter experiments with my dad’s Olympus OM-4 (remember when Olympus made decent products?) and some rolls of expired Fujicolor, to when I actually started “working” and my fridge was filled with beer, and either Fujicolor Press 400 and 800, and a few scurrilous rolls of Fuji 1600, and then the “expensive” rolls of Provia, Velvia, and Kodachrome that I reserved for “proper” shoots instead of the club work. Half the fun was selecting the right stock and having to work with it. Sure if your SLR allowed, you could shoot, rewind, hope the heck the camera kept track of which frame you were on, and swap mid-roll, but those system were crazy complex and didn’t work half the time, and were only present on “modern” film SLRs like the EOS-1 and F5 for you Nikonians. I only had Pentax gear so I had to wing it per roll or push/pull, mark the roll as “+” or “-” and have the lab run a clip test before I committed to the development run. 

Now, I hung on to film for way longer than anyone else in my field of concert and club photography did. It was a cost issue, of course, and a performance issue as well. Also, I worked part time at a professional film lab on South Beach, so I could get my film run for free, and I could buy film at cost, or grab expired rolls dirt cheap or on the house. So film was “cheap” for me…figured I’d get that out of the way before someone points out the money I spent on film and processing could have gotten me a DSLR. But even then, the DSLRs of the day had middling results at best. The flagship Nikon D1 made everything magenta, the Canon D30 and 1D were pricing in at $1000 per megapixel, and the Kodak DCS beasts were $20,000 a pop and “only” cranked 6 megapixels. I was a working photographer but not at that level yet. 

People at my level who were shooting digital were going with point-and-shoots and semi-automatic compacts just to get their foot in the door. I guess I was a snob and refused to shoot with something that didn’t have the full manual control I was used to. So I sat it out, shooting film, scanning, dust-spotting, and feeding anything that needed to be printed to the Frontier. Hell, before I got my film scanner I actually scanned from prints (ack!) from the lab. 

However, in 2003, Canon kicked down the price door with the 6MP 10D. Finally the price/performance ratio was there. I actually got one of the first units off the line. I retired my Pentax kit and kind of didn’t look back. 

However, the film experience did teach me to know how to get a shot “blind”. Plus, I still feel that I’ve got that knowledge to know when a photo is successful even before I look at the display. Maybe it’s old-man syndrome (I’m not that old by the way) but there’s a whole generation of working, and even successful photographers in all genres who have never touched film, and just rely on the method of “shoot-adjust-shoot-adjust-shoot” to get what they need. I guess I can’t fault it since there’s no waste, but certainly, much like laptops have done for DJing, the barrier to entry is much lower. Also, something I’m actually opposed to, clients do ask for “more photos” per gig than they used to. There’s an art to it, and most marketdroids only see Facebook tags and web traffic as opposed to a well-crafted image to represent their venture with. Web traffic is nice and pays dividends for a business, but there’s something to be said for the “old” way. Fortunately I have a client body which agrees with me. 

Maybe like my friend joked, I am too cheap to buy extensive memory capacity, and I’m certainly not going to commit a venial sin by shooting JPEG straight out of the camera, but limiting myself to 200ish images per event does keep me in that “film” mindset so I tend to shoot conservatively. 

Though I guess I’m not a total throwback. I alter ISO settings with an alarming frequency and 6400 does not scare me. I love going way beyond what the current club snappers consider “acceptable” and rocking out at 6400 or 12800. And using noise reduction sparingly. Noise is noise and grain is grain. 1600 ISO film was horrendous by today’s standards but many a PJ “got the shot” with 1600 ISO film and crafted masterworks from it. 

I’m certainly not advocating a return to film. I shoot with an MK II, and I believe it’s one of Canon’s crowning achievements (wacky autofocus be damned) and should sit on the mantle at their camera museum. Even after the MK III drops, I’ll be using my MK II, since it’s a superb machine.

However, I can’t recommend enough to anyone who even takes their photo work half-seriously to pick up a manual film SLR, find some rolls of film, and shoot away in a variety of situations. You’ll learn a lot not being able to see your results instantaneously, and you do get a severe case of the shivers when your film comes off the line and you’re whipping out a loupe to check it out on a lightbox. I think it’s funny actually that Lightroom uses photo lab analogies when a good percentage of it’s users probably have never step foot in a photo lab. If you go this route, I recommend a lab which uses a “dip and dunk” machine (usually a Refrema). Unfortunately it seems South Florida is bereft of any place with such a machine, so the best bet is to send your stock to Duggal in New York. The downside is you’re sans photos for about a week (unless you live in New York or pay for expediting), but the upside is, you’re dealing with the guys who invented the process. While writing this, I actually had to double check if they still did development, but I suppose with the consolidation of the processing industry, they probably have most of the business in the Western Hemisphere now. 

And also picking and choosing film stock is kind of fun. You always have to figure out what you want, and which stock will deliver. Oh, and if you don’t know, read the box, guess, and roll the dice. It’s so random. Plus if you’re fortunate enough to live by a quality lab, you can drop off your work, go drink somewhere, and come back and pick up your results. 

Now, printing is another story, but I’ll save that for another entry. 

I still have my Pentax kit…hmm.