Last Updated on 07/01/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
Feeling stuck with your photography? Try stripping your gear down to the basics and doing some film photography instead.
Many of today’s photographers are starting to do hybrid photography; shooting with both digital and film cameras. The former is for work, the latter for personal projects. With this setup, photographers often find it helpful for shaking up their routines, doing photography differently, and overcoming creative fatigue. If this is something you haven’t tried yet, here’s a video by Ben Kepka that shows how he does it.
Let’s face it, creative fatigue happens a lot when you do too much of something, including photography. For Ben, his motivation for taking pictures and making videos has slowly waned, and he always turns to shooting film to remedy that. In this video, he decided to pick up an Olympus OM-1 (an all-mechanical, manually operated 35mm SLR camera loved by many for its compact size), and loaded it with Kodak Tri-X 400. The goal? To go full analog for a day. Let’s see how it went down for him.
Shooting film is definitely not as easy as today’s digital means and methods, as Ben showed throughout the shoot. Everything is done manually, and there’s a lot that can go wrong from the moment you load the film. But it’s often through handicaps and limitations like these that we rewire our brains and get creative when it comes to overcoming them.
We also learn from Ben that shooting in manual mode with a film camera forces you to learn how to get your settings right, depending on the setting and lighting conditions of a given moment. Because of this, you slow down, pay attention to what you’re shooting, and double-check your settings before pressing the shutter. Because you also have a limited amount of photos, you tend to be more careful about your subject and composition.
Ben’s results are really good, don’t you think? No wonder he finds that it works every time he wants to break free from a creative rut. Give film photography a go today and see what you will come up with!
Check out Ben Kepka’s YouTube channel for more of his photography tips and tricks.