When a Polaroid camera nails the focus and exposure, the results can be compelling.
This exposure shows that the camera is capable of getting genuinely sharp focus. More importantly, it shows what the film can do.
It’s still not an accurate record of the scene in the way that shooting with a digital camera might be.
But perhaps that’s precisely the point.
It’s more interesting than that.
There is something quite extraordinary about the way Polaroid i-Type film renders a scene.
It isn't an absolutely faithful recreation of a moment.
It's more like a half-remembered dream.
The colours are exaggerated. The whole thing has the feeling that an artist must have painted it rather than a camera captured it.
It's a unique recollection of a place that you can't quite put your finger on. You know you've been there, but you can't quite remember where it was.
It reminds me of Roger Waters lyrics:
When I was a child
I had a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
Perhaps that's what I like about instant film.
It doesn't necessarily show you what was there.
Sometimes it shows you what you remember.
This photo was taken by me in Bristol on my Holga 120 GN.
I used Kentmere Pan 400.
It has all the elements of a classic Holga frame. The weird out-of-focus areas and the inexplicably sharp centre of the photograph where the old cargo ship is moored, contrasting with the ultra-modern building behind it.
The picture looks less like a photograph of Bristol and more like somewhere you’ve half remembered.
It’s really satisfying.
When you're out in the rain, you have no option but to look for scenes that show how the weather is affecting people.
In this photo, a group of people huddle under their umbrellas while the street is slick with rainwater.
If you look you'll see this everywhere.
Rain, when you're out in it, can add something to a photograph.
The wet sheen on the pavement, people sheltering under a brolly, all of it helps tell a tale.
This photograph was taken as a snapshot on a vintage 1980s camera, the Ricoh FF3-AF.
Perhaps there is something to be said for embracing the weather, whatever nature happens to throw at you.
A friend of mine, Dave Whenham, read my blog post extolling the virtues of a P&S camera, and especially the one I used to have in the 1990s.
I was waxing lyrical about the camera and how much I missed it.
Dave had a Ricoh FF3-AF from the same era and said that he was happy to give the camera to me as a gift.
It took a bit of jiggery pokery, but needless to say I drove 250 miles round trip to have a cup of coffee and a natter with Dave, as well as collect the camera.
Some might say the economics of such a trip don't stack up.
But time spent with a friend is never wasted.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to try the camera out. Dave had loaded a roll of FP4 Plus into it before handing it over, so I had a new camera and a new roll of film to try.
Saturday was a bright morning, and I was hopeful of a good day out.
By the time the train arrived in Bristol, it was lashing it down.
What is it with these train trips and poor weather?
Anyway, I was out. This time wearing my winter wax jacket and waterproof shoes, so onwards to shoot the film.
I chose Bristol because I know it really well, and that meant I could target different areas, all within easy walking distance.
The Ricoh is a Point & Shoot and, as such, it doesn't have all the dials and controls of an SLR.
But that's OK.
Sometimes you just want to shoot the camera and make pictures.
I relied on the fact that by the 1980s and 1990s, film cameras, especially point-and-shoot cameras, had become remarkably reliable when it came to metering and focusing.
Shooting the first frame, I was surprised to see a red light appear in the viewfinder.
Upon closer inspection, the red light turned out to be an icon showing a mountain.
That'll be infinity then.
The viewfinder is large enough for this type of camera and really usable.
The shutter button allows a half press to lock focus and exposure, but over 36 frames I didn't manage to half press it once.
I simply ended up with an exposure.
A bit of a hair trigger then.
I'd dialled in 200 on the ISO setting. Unusually for a camera of this era, the Ricoh doesn't rely on DX encoding on the film cartridge.
That's good news, as it means I don't have to worry about the camera choosing the film speed for me or having to calculate exposure compensation around it.
The lens cover is easy to slide open when you want to take a photograph, and there are no false-open positions where it looks open but the camera won't actually take a picture, like the LC-A.
The camera also has a tripod mount and a self-timer, so tripod-mounted excursions in, say, a church could be accommodated, although I didn't try that on this occasion.
Auto wind is another feature of this camera.
I know this because there is no wind-on lever or knob, and because the high-pitched scream that ensues when a frame has been exposed is a little alarming when you first hear it.
The mechanism also takes an inordinate amount of time, considering the thing is winding on a single 35mm frame.
Never mind.
No films were harmed in this experiment.
When you reach the final frame, a light appears on top of the camera to tell you so. The camera, however, appears to operate normally until you notice the light.
Some cameras can get 37 or 38 frames out of a 36-exposure film, so I wondered if that might be the case here.
It wasn't.
Rewinding the exposed film back into the cartridge is achieved using a slider on the bottom of the camera.
The motor screams in protest and takes considerably longer than it should to rewind the film.
Once the camera has completed the rewind, another high-pitched noise is emitted over the already screaming motor to tell you.
Nice.
Simply stopping the rewind motor wasn't a design choice then?
There is a flash onboard, but I didn't use it.
So there we are.
A new-to-me Ricoh FF3-AF, courtesy of a good friend and 250 miles of driving for a cup of coffee, a natter and a camera.
I'd say that's a pretty good deal.
One of the things about photography that I have been commenting on in recent posts is the fact that there is always another day. We can always return and try again.
But there is an extension to that. More to the discussion than just there is always another day.
There is always another camera.
There is always another film.What all this is doing is giving us permission to experiment in an environment where we don't need to view photography as getting the picture right the first time in the camera.
In fact, I don't think that is a desirable endpoint at all for any photographer.
To pick up on an earlier post, it gives us permission to fail and I think that is liberating.
It seems obvious to me that commercial photographers haven't got time to be messing about and, mostly, they have been given a short time to get the "photo" for the client.
Harry Borden, a portrait photographer who has shot the rich and famous, says that he's typically given an hour for the shoot, of which the subject often messes about, burning valuable time.
So for him, getting it right first time in camera might be important.
OK, so maybe not right first time in camera because an hour is a decent chunk of time, but if the subject burns 30 minutes by being a little uncooperative, the pressure must really be on to nail the brief.
Harry Borden also speaks about the moment that he knows he's got the frame, nailed the brief, and then he starts trying other things. He experiments.
But the constraints of a commercial photographer are miles away from the freedom with which the hobbyist operates.
As a hobbyist there is no client waiting for the photo, no stressed art director screaming for the cover picture for a Sunday supplement.
You have all the time in the world.
You can come back another day, you can try another camera, you can pick a different film, you can choose the golden hour in the morning instead of midday, you can choose Rodinal over HC-110.
There isn't a scenario that I can think of where that isn't true.
Well, perhaps there is.
If you go on an expensive holiday, say to Peru, and you are able to shoot at Machu Picchu, you probably aren't going to go back a year later simply because you weren't completely happy with the photographs.
Preparation becomes more important when the opportunity is difficult or expensive to repeat.
But then again, that's not really unique to the hobbyist photographer. Harry Borden talks about the preparation he does for his client-led shoots. He knows what he is there to do before the subject walks through the door.
Research, in its most basic form, can mean looking at Instagram and Pinterest which might show you the typical photographs taken of where you are going. It might also provide travel information to tell you about the best time of day. Visiting a library might show you a book that provides a completely different perspective for that destination. You can think about what you want to photograph before you get there.
When I went to Chichen Itza in Mexico, I had an hour to wander around and take photographs.
I found that plenty of time.
The pictures weren't all portfolio standard and they weren't the best work that I've ever done, but enough of the two rolls I shot there were good enough that I didn't feel the need to return to Mexico.
And perhaps that's another important part of this.
The point isn't that we should keep going back until we get the perfect photograph.
The point is that we can.
Perhaps this is where I question the whole idea of needing a camera that gets it right first time.
Obviously, such a camera is desirable. Who wouldn't want a camera that nails the exposure, gets the focus exactly where it needs to be and produces a technically perfect file every time?
But I'm not sure I want the camera making all of those decisions for me.
Maybe that is why I enjoy film photography, when all is said and done.
Perhaps the imperfections are part of the point.
If I use a camera that doesn't always get things right, I have to make more decisions myself. I have to think about the light. I have to think about the exposure. I have to decide where to stand. I have to decide when to press the shutter.
And sometimes I'll get it wrong.
That's OK.
There is always another day.
Another camera.
Another film.
Another view.
Another time of day.
Another developer.
The photograph doesn't have to be right first time, but it will be mine.
We live in a world where AI is integrated into the tools that we all use. To some people, this is problematic, while others see the trend as nothing but good. Wherever you sit on the discussion, one thing is clear: we are all human beings and we all have a choice.
In photography, we have an idea that the camera doesn't lie and, while that notion has repeatedly been debunked, there is something in that concept that we hang onto.
Modern digital cameras are no more than computers purporting to be a camera. Computers run software and therefore the ability to integrate AI into a digital camera isn't beyond the realms of reality. In some cases, that is exactly what happens.
AI tools are already able to "fix" photographs in camera without being asked to. They can overcome a lack of skill and the physical shortcomings of smartphone lenses by using Generative Image Manipulation. You can handhold a smartphone at 600x magnification and end up with a perfectly sharp picture.
Try doing that with an SLR camera and a roll of FP4 Plus.
For clarity, I don't believe that everything AI produces is worthless and neither do I believe that everything humans do is too valuable to be changed, questioned or interfered with. Humans have been churning out the equivalent of pigswill forever.
I'm sure when the printing press was invented, the Church wanted to use it to benefit humankind by mass producing exact copies of the Bible. They must have been disappointed to learn that pamphlets were also being produced with dirty stories in them.
AI is a tool and we, as humans, must learn to use that tool to our advantage, just like early farmers became skilled ploughmen or we all learned how to drive a car.
There is something in the AI debate that people are overlooking, and that is the belief that the future will be either AI or human, but not both.
But the reality will be somewhere in the middle, like it always is.
Humans can choose to act as humans.
In recent times there has been a move in education away from the Humanities towards those skills that might get you a better job.
So what about those people who aren't interested in money but are interested in writing or painting?
Didn't the great painters and writers of the past rely on patrons and commissions to pay the rent? Weren't paintings by great painters found on the wall in Parisian cafes because the artist had needed a meal?
What happens to creativity when a machine can produce something technically perfect in seconds?
Perhaps the answer isn't to compete with the machine.
Perhaps it's to do something the machine can't do.
Perhaps it's to be human.
Maybe the question that we should all be asking is not whether AI is good or bad, but how much of the decision-making process, in photography at least, do we want to abdicate to a machine?
And that, in the most roundabout way possible, brings me back to photography.
The bit of photography that I enjoy is the bit that I do. All those little decisions and changes to the settings of the camera that bring me closer to producing a photograph, as a negative and then positive, that I have imagined and pre-visualised when I was looking at a scene.
Now, if I fail, the failure is mine.
That's being human, isn't it?
In the film A Good Year, the character Uncle Henry says, "Failure often elicits great wisdom."
Isn't that a human trait?
How do we know what we are trying to find until we fail to find it?
So I implore you all to grab a camera and be a human.
Make your decisions, but once you've done that, live with the results.
Stop believing that if only you'd had a different lens, or the light was better, or you'd dialled in f8, you'd have produced a masterpiece.
Perhaps you would have, but it is by no means certain.
Make the work as a human.
Failure isn't to fail. It is an opportunity to learn.
If the results aren't quite up to your imagined photograph, well, you can always try again.
I've photographed this scene on Polaroid film, Fujifilm Instax Wide, 35mm film, 120 film and 4×5.
And none of them have quite been right.
Or, at least, none of them have looked quite how I wanted them to look.
I've changed the film. I've changed the format. I've changed the camera. I've tried different ways of approaching the same scene, but I'm still not quite there.
Perhaps that's the point of photography.
Perhaps we're never quite satisfied with the first attempt.
There's always another film to try, another camera, another way of seeing it. Another opportunity to make the photograph that's in your head.
And maybe that's what keeps us coming back.
To keep trying.
I watched a YouTube video recently in which the presenter set out to give us the hard truth about the state of photography.
Apparently, digital is better than film. Not just a bit better, but better by pretty much any measurement you care to apply.
He also suggested that film technology had effectively reached a plateau by around 1990.
It got me thinking.
I'm not going to argue that my Nikon F75 loaded with FP4 Plus is technically superior to a modern digital camera. It plainly isn't. Give me a modern digital camera and a few minutes with a spreadsheet and I suspect digital will win most of the contests.
But I'm not sure that's the point.
I've always found the digital versus film argument slightly odd. You don't hear painters arguing that another artist's work is somehow inferior because they painted on wood rather than canvas.
Nobody looks at a painting and says, "That's very nice, but imagine how much better it would have been if he'd used the latest canvas technology."
Different mediums have different characteristics. That's the whole point.
And photography should be allowed the same freedom.
There's a good example within film itself.
Kodak introduced T-Max. Ilford developed the Delta Professional range. Both represented newer film technology than the traditional emulsions that had gone before them.
But nobody points at someone shooting Tri-X or HP5 Plus and laughs.
Nobody says, "You're still using that old film? T-Max exists, you know."
Because we understand that the films are different.
Tri-X has its character. HP5 Plus has its character. Delta has its character. T-Max has its character. You choose the film because of what it gives you, not simply because it happens to contain the newest technology.
So why does the argument suddenly change when we put a digital sensor into the camera?
There is another part of the "film plateaued in 1990" argument that interests me, too.
Did film actually reach the limits of what was possible?
Or did we simply stop looking?
From the 1990s onwards, enormous amounts of money were poured into developing digital imaging. Sensors, processors, storage, noise reduction, autofocus, image processing — generation after generation of engineers were given huge budgets to make digital photography better.
Film didn't get anything like that.
The market was moving away from it. The investment followed the market.
So perhaps film really had reached its technological limits.
But perhaps it hadn't.
Perhaps if the photographic industry had spent the next forty years putting the same sort of money and research into silver-halide technology, we'd have seen films that were dramatically different from those available in 1980.
Finer grain. Faster films. Better reciprocity. Greater latitude. Better colour. Who knows?
We'll never know.
And that's the important bit.
We can't point to the lack of progress in film after 1990 and conclude that film had reached the limits of what was technologically possible.
All we can say is that the incentive to find out largely disappeared.
But even that isn't really my main argument.
I'm not particularly interested in declaring a winner.
Digital is an extraordinary technology. It is more convenient, more flexible and, by almost any technical measurement, considerably more capable than the film cameras I use.
So what?
Photography isn't a competition to see which medium can produce the highest number on a specification sheet.
I shoot film because I like what film gives me.
Someone else shoots digital because they like what digital gives them.
Someone else might shoot wet plate, Polaroid or something I've never even heard of.
They're all valid.
A painter doesn't need to use the "best" medium.
Neither does a photographer.
Perhaps photography is one of the few art forms where we're expected to choose our medium by reading the specification sheet.
I'm quite happy to ignore it.
I just want to make photographs I like..
Recently I found myself in Bath in a rainstorm. And it wasn't the sort of rain you could work with. It was the kind of heavy downpour that required people to find shelter.
I took this frame while sheltering myself.
I found myself in an arch underneath the railway, looking towards the other end, where a group of people were waiting for the rain to stop.
I knew the picture would need to be quite graphic, with deep blacks and very little detail in the shadows.
So I metered for the light at the end of the tunnel and took the shot.
Sometimes the weather makes the picture for you.
This was the first frame of a 36-exposure roll of Ilford FP4 Plus, shot on a trip that eventually took me to Bath.
I always worry about getting that first frame in the bag. It’s like the photographic day hasn’t really started until I’ve taken it.
It was pouring with rain and the light was awful. I took the shot at f/4 and 1/20th, not really knowing what I was going to get.
The train arriving at the platform near my home turned out to be a pretty good way to start.
The detail is impressive, but it’s the atmosphere I like most. Rain, low light and a train appearing from the gloom.
Not a bad first frame.
When photographers mention frugality or a budget approach to their craft, the conversation inevitably revolves around low-cost cameras, the Lomography Sprocket Rocket springs to mind here, or budget, low-cost film stock. Even when it comes to low-cost cameras, there are those who will search out a charity shop bargain and make use of that.
All of these things are valid. Reducing the cost of photography, especially during the current cost-of-living crisis in the UK, is becoming more and more important to photographers.
I understand the mindset of buying the best camera you can for the little amount of money you have available and taking your photographs with that. A nice SLR, even with a so-called "kit" lens, will take some lovely photographs. Sometimes, using what you have to hand is better than not getting out at all.
One of the things that hardly ever gets discussed when talking about budget film photography is how to save money on developing chemicals. I understand that photographers want to get good results and that they believe this is an area where saving money is a false economy.
However, I have a different point of view.
I have mentioned before that I am a user of Ilford PQ Universal developer. I think the clue is in the name. It's a universal developer.
The chemistry behind PQ Universal has a history that goes back to a company called May & Baker, who sold a related developer under the trade name of Suprol.
Suprol was marketed by May & Baker primarily as a paper developer, but the story doesn't end there. May & Baker were a major photographic-chemical manufacturer, and their technical literature covered considerably more than simply developing prints. Suprol was used in technical photography and, according to recollections from photographers who worked with the product, in commercial black-and-white film processing as well.
There is an interesting historical point here. Suprol wasn't simply something that photographers experimented with in their darkrooms. May & Baker supplied photographic chemistry to the professional processing industry, where developers needed to be capable of dealing with a range of films and processing conditions. There was no practical option of saying, 'Sorry, we only develop sheet film in this.'
Ilford's modern documentation takes a much more cautious position with PQ Universal, specifically recommending it for technical and sheet films while saying not to use it for general-purpose 35mm and roll film. That's their recommendation and it's perfectly legitimate. But 'not recommended' isn't the same thing as 'doesn't work'. So the absence of the 1+29 and 1+39 dilutions from Ilford's current recommendations simply suggests, to me at least, that Ilford's documentation is not incorrect as much as incomplete.
My own experience would suggest that the distinction matters. At 1+29, PQ Universal produces perfectly good negatives from 35mm film, and I've got the negatives to prove it.
If May & Baker's own technical literature was prepared for different forms of photographic processing, and Suprol could be used at different dilutions for different applications, then the modern idea that using a paper developer for film is somehow photographic sacrilege starts to look rather silly.
There is the further dilution of 1+39. This dilution wasn't simply an internet-era experiment. There are recollections from photographers familiar with the original May & Baker documentation that Suprol was used at 1+39 for fine-grain film processing.
I use PQ Universal at a dilution of 1+29. My negatives are lovely, fine grain examples.
At a dilution of 1+29, one litre of PQ Universal makes 30 litres of working solution. I use 350ml for a 35mm film, which means I can get around 85 films from a litre of concentrate. That works out at about 18p per film at £15 a litre. And because I use it as a one-shot developer, every film gets fresh developer and is processed in exactly the same way.
And here is the real cost saving: I don't buy Ilford PQ Universal. There is a company called Fotospeed who produce a product called PD 5. I phoned them and asked if I could use PD 5 in the same way as PQ Universal, and they confirmed that it was a suitable alternative to Ilford PQ Universal.
It's a fiver cheaper than Ilford's product, hence my £15 a litre cost. The Ilford product costs nearer £20 per litre. In fairness to Ilford, that still only makes the cost per film around 23p when developing at 1+29.
To contrast with the standard developer from Ilford, their ID-11 product will develop 10 films per litre when the stock solution is reused. At a tenner a pack, that's a quid a roll! And to get the full 10 rolls you have to increase the development time after each successive film.
I don't keep the PD 5 as one large litre bottle once I've opened it, either. I decant each litre into four 250ml bottles. Before capping them, I give each bottle a small puff of butane into the top. Butane is heavier than air, so it sits above the developer and helps prevent oxygen getting to the concentrate and oxidising it. That way, I'm only exposing 250ml of developer to the air each time I open a bottle.
Fotospeed are worth checking out because their FX30 fixer is cheaper than premium-badged alternatives and lasts well. I make up a fresh litre of diluted FX30 at 1+4 and check the time it takes to clear the film. This is usually around 30 seconds. When this changes to 2.5 minutes, I change the fixer, given that the typical MDC fixer time is 5 minutes, and my rule is that fixing time should be double the clearing time.
Reusing fixer like this also saves money and, in my experience, doesn't compromise quality.
Frugal photography doesn't have to mean cutting corners. Sometimes it simply means understanding your materials well enough not to throw perfectly usable chemistry down the sink.
*Note, the photographs shown in this blog post were taken by me and developed in PD 5 at 1+29.
When you venture out with your Holga, set to 645, you definitely have to accept a lack of control and lean into the unpredictable nature of the camera and lens.
However, every now and again, the universe aligns just so and the unpredictable and inconsistent Holga produces a decent negative amongst the rest.
I like this photograph because the light is hitting the fruit and veg on the stand outside the greengrocer's shop just right. The shadows surrounding the produce have some detail, but also serve as a frame for the subject.
The focus is spot on and was set using the two-person icon.
A decent photo from a walk roll.
When I got my first Holga all those years ago, the camera was a Holga 120S. It was supplied with a 645 mask, and the door on the back that lets you choose between using 12 exposures for 6x6 and 16 exposures for 645 had been glued to 645.
The rumour goes that the designer wasn't happy with the performance at 6x6, due to the heavy vignette, and so demanded that the factory leave out the 6x6 mask and glue the number door at 645. I don't know if this is true, but if it is, it was a sensible move for general photography.
Today, most people will want the Holga look: the heavy vignette, the weird out-of-focus areas of the photograph and the less-than-sharp focus. So they all use the 6x6 format, and there aren't many people who use 645.
Recently, I've given it a go.
Aside from the fact that the 645 mode makes the normal photograph portrait orientation, and for landscape you have to turn the camera through 90 degrees, the 645 mode works really well.
I rather like it.
You get four more exposures per roll, which allows for a better choice of negatives when the film is finally developed. And with a Holga, those extra frames can really make a difference.
The photograph below was taken in 645 mode, and I think it has worked brilliantly.
It also occurred to me that the 645 format actually suits some subjects rather well. The portrait orientation gives a photograph somewhere to lead the eye, and that seems to work naturally with this sort of close-up subject.
I set the camera's zone focus to the one-person icon, which is 3 feet or 1 metre, and didn't bother framing too carefully because, at such a short distance, it's not that critical.
The A on the sign is out of focus, while the S and E are correctly focused — or at least as correctly focused as anything ever is with a Holga.
But isn't that the idea?
To embrace uncertainty, lean into the unpredictable and maybe, just maybe, have a photograph that works despite its humble origins?
