I met a fellow photographer who I initially spoke to on the Foto app, and we met for a coffee a few months ago as we are both based in Cornwall. Rick is an incredible photographer, and I highly recommend taking a peek at his website (www.rickdavy.co.uk). I reached out to him to ask if he wanted to go for a photo walk. That’s right, I initiated the thing that I thought was some myth and against my principles of photographic solitude.

We agreed to meet in St Ives, super beautiful and super busy in August. I won’t lie, I was nervous on the drive there. I didn’t know what to expect or whether the whole thing would be a mistake.

But guess what. I loved it.

It was great fun, and I could try to analytically break down why it’s a great thing to do, but I don’t think that’s necessary. We had great chat, had a laugh, I learned some new stuff and took some great shots. What else could I ask for?

Rick and I will definitely meet up again, and I will definitely be more open-minded about photo walks in the future.

Photos from the walk, shot on a Canon 350D:

There is also a romance attached to it, of course. Perhaps too much of one. The cameras, the rolls of Kodak in the freezer, the little plastic canisters, the ritual of loading them, dropping the finished rolls at the lab, waiting for the email. There is a wonderful physicality to all of it. Photography becomes a process rather than simply the production of an image. And I think, for a while, I began to confuse my love of that process with photography itself.

Then, circumstances change, life gets in the way, and using film no longer feels like a cost you can justify, so I started using an old Canon EOS 350D again.

There was nothing particularly romantic about this. The 350D is an early consumer DSLR from 2005. It is chunky and plasticky and has a tiny screen on the back that now looks almost comically inadequate. It does not have the cultural cachet of carrying an Olympus XA2 around your neck or pulling a Konica Hexar AF from your bag. Nobody is going to stop you in the street and ask what film you have loaded in it. It is just an old digital camera.

And, initially at least, I felt strangely guilty about enjoying it.

I think some of that guilt came from feeling as though I was going backwards. Film had somehow become the more serious version of photography in my head. Digital was convenient. Film was intentional. Digital was taking lots of pictures. Film was making photographs. There is a language around analogue photography that reinforces this. The limitation of 36 exposures is supposed to make us more thoughtful. Not being able to see the photograph immediately supposedly makes us more present. Choosing a film stock beforehand forces us to commit to an aesthetic rather than endlessly manipulating an image afterwards.

There is truth in all of that.

But I have started to wonder whether a limitation that makes one person more creative might make another person less so.

Because something happened when I started walking around with the Canon. I started taking more risks.

I don’t simply mean that I took more photographs, although obviously I did. I mean that I started trying things that I probably wouldn’t have tried with film. I could see something that might make a photograph and just take it. Then take it again from somewhere else. Get closer. Move further away. Wait for somebody to enter the frame. Photograph the reflection instead. Underexpose it. Put something in the foreground. Try the composition I wasn’t convinced would work.

Sometimes none of it worked. And that was fine. That might be the thing I had been missing most: permission to fail.

There is a consequence attached to pressing the shutter with film that simply isn’t there with digital. A roll gives you 36 attempts. The film costs money. Developing costs money. Scanning costs money. And that is fine if 36 frames come back and you love 36 photographs, but of course they don’t. Sometimes there are ten. Sometimes there are three. Sometimes you get a roll back and wonder what on earth you were looking at that day. In ‘How I take Photographs’, Daido Moriyama suggests that you should use a whole roll of film walking down one street, and perhaps this explains why he decided to go digital himself.

None of this makes film bad. I love film. But it does make the often repeated claim that limitation necessarily creates creativity feel a little too neat.

Sometimes limitation creates caution. And caution isn’t always particularly useful for making art.

I started thinking about this through music. One of the things I have always loved about jazz is what happens when musicians understand a form well enough to start pulling it apart. You can hear it in Coltrane, and in that movement towards the avant-garde, where harmony and structure don’t disappear so much as become things that can be questioned. What happens if we stretch this? What happens if we abandon that? What happens if sound itself becomes something we can play with?

There is discipline underneath it, obviously. Freedom without any understanding of the instrument isn’t necessarily interesting. But there is also play.

And I think I had lost a little bit of play from my photography.

Film made me deliberate. That was valuable. It taught me to slow down and look. It made me think about colour and light and texture differently. But somewhere along the way I had started treating the photograph as something I needed to get right rather than something I could discover.

Digital has started to reverse that.

The photograph doesn’t even have to be finished when I press the shutter. I shoot RAW on the Canon, and when I get home I can look at what I have made and ask another question: what does this photograph want to be?

Maybe it wants colour. Maybe it works better in black and white. Perhaps the colours need muting. Perhaps the blacks need lifting. Perhaps I want grain. Perhaps I want something cleaner. I can crop it and realise that what I thought was the photograph when I took it wasn’t actually the photograph at all. None of those decisions feel like correcting a failure at the point of capture. Increasingly they feel like part of making the picture.

This probably sounds obvious to people who have always shot digital. It should have been obvious to me too. Darkrooms have always been places where photographs were interpreted rather than simply reproduced. Cropping, dodging, burning, contrast, exposure and colour have never been separate from photographic authorship. The idea that the untouched negative represents some uniquely pure form of photography is itself a kind of fiction.

But there was something else I realised too. I had spent a lot of time thinking about film stocks. Portra. Gold. Ultramax. Black-and-white stocks. The particular way each renders colour, skin, skies, shadows. I still find all of that fascinating. Yet I wonder if I had begun developing a look before I had properly developed a language.

Those are not the same thing.

A look can be grain, muted greens, warm highlights, lifted blacks and pastel colours. A photographic language is something much harder to describe. It is the thing that makes somebody look at a photograph and know who took it before they see the name underneath.

It is what you notice.

Perhaps that is what I am trying to find now.

And the strange thing is that an old digital camera might be helping me find it precisely because I don’t feel particularly precious about it. I can leave the house and shoot 150 photographs. Most can be terrible. I can delete them. Twenty might be interesting. Five might be good. Perhaps one makes me stop.

Then I can ask why.

Why that photograph? Why did I notice that? Why do I keep photographing people through windows? Why do certain colours make me stop? Why do I keep putting people at the edge of the frame? Why am I drawn to this particular kind of light?

Do that often enough and perhaps your photographic language begins to reveal itself to you rather than being something you manufacture in advance.

There is an uncomfortable economic dimension to all of this too. Film photography has become expensive enough that I think we have to be careful about romanticising its limitations. There is something slightly elitist about telling people that restricting themselves to 36 photographs will make them better photographers when the price of those 36 photographs, once the film has been bought, processed and scanned, is significant. Being able to waste a roll of film in the pursuit of experimentation is itself a privilege.

When something becomes expensive, it doesn’t only become less accessible. It can become less fun. You protect it. You save it. You wait for something worthy of it.

And sometimes art needs precisely the opposite. It needs waste. It needs mistakes. It needs the photograph that shouldn’t work. It needs you to take six versions of something ridiculous just to discover that the seventh contains an idea you hadn’t anticipated.

That doesn’t mean I am giving up film.

In fact, I think I’m beginning to understand better where film belongs in my photography.

I took my Olympus XA2 on holiday and loved it. In that context, everything I love about film makes sense again. I don’t want to spend a holiday walking around with a DSLR hanging from me. The XA2 disappears into a pocket. I can take it to dinner, to the beach, walking through a city. And there is something beautiful about having a finite record of a few days away. Those photographs don’t need endless experimentation. They are memories. The texture and colour and imperfection of film become part of the memory itself.

I want to keep doing that.

I want to shoot film occasionally simply because I love shooting film. I want to take the XA2 away with me. I want to load a particular stock because I am curious about what it will do. I want to experience that ridiculous excitement when the email from the lab arrives and I have temporarily forgotten half the photographs on the roll.

But I don’t think I need film to prove that I am serious about photography.

And perhaps that was the little bit of guilt I needed to get rid of.

There doesn’t have to be a side.

Film isn’t better than digital. Digital isn’t better than film. They are different materials with different possibilities and different constraints. A painter can use oils and then pick up charcoal without having betrayed oils. A musician can play an acoustic piano and then make something with a synthesiser. The question isn’t which medium has greater artistic purity. The question is what the artist can do with it.

So I’m going to keep the film cameras.

I’m going to keep loving film.

But I’m also going to walk around with this slightly battered, twenty-year-old Canon and take far too many photographs. I’m going to make bad ones. I’m going to crop things. Change things. Try things. Add grain when I want grain. Leave it out when I don’t. I’m going to stop worrying quite so much about whether something looks sufficiently like film and start wondering what I actually want my photographs to look like.

Perhaps film taught me to slow down and look.

Maybe digital is teaching me to play again.

Mostly looking at things I’d normally walk past.

The sea kept getting in the way.

That was enough for today.

Have a great Christmas and New Year all!

Birmingham, Kentmere Pan 200, Nikon F80.

I’ve spent the past few weeks sharing single black-and-white images from a recent trip to Birmingham.

The trip was a work related excursion. I was heading to the West Midlands for a conference I’d be attending and speaking at.

A four-and-a-half-hour drive each way. Nine hours on the road from West Cornwall to Birmingham City Centre.

By the time I arrived, the light was beginning to fade, but on that short walk to the hotel I could already see so many possible shots.

That’s one of the things I love about travelling for work. You get to see places you wouldn’t otherwise. Especially considering I live in a very small town.

So, I always bring a couple of cameras with me, just in case I find a pocket of time to wander.

A City in Rush Hour

Living in a small Cornish town, beautiful, yes, but small, means you sometimes feel like you’ve run out of fresh images to shoot.

Birmingham was the opposite: tall glass buildings rubbing shoulders with old brick ones, light bouncing off windows, people moving fast.

After dropping my bags at the hotel, I grabbed my Nikon F80 and loaded a fresh roll of Kentmere Pan 200, a film I’d never used before.

It came from a mystery bundle I’d ordered from filmprocessing.co.uk, the same folks who process and scan all my film.

They do a brilliant job, and if you’re looking for an online lab, I’d happily recommend them.

By the time I hit the streets, it was around 4 p.m. Rush hour. People leaving work, buses filling, headlights beginning to appear.

I just walked, camera in hand, and shot whatever caught my attention, the play between modern and historic architecture, the pockets of graffiti, the contrast between wide open spaces and packed pavements.

First Impressions of K-Pan 200

I’d heard that Kentmere Pan 200 was a fairly cheap stock, decent, but unremarkable.

Honestly, I was surprised by how much I liked it. The sharpness, the tones, the depth of contrast, everything felt balanced and alive.

Maybe it was the Nikon.

Either way, these ended up being some of my favourite black-and-white shots yet, maybe my favourite images, full stop.

And After

So, here they are, a few photographs from a long day’s drive.

Taken quickly, the night before the big conference.

I’ll definitely be using K-Pan 200 again. I’m curious to see how it performs with some of my other cameras, maybe the Mamiya 6, or even the Olympus Mju 1.

For now, I’m just glad I packed the camera.

I’m still pretty new on this whole camera film and film stock journey. As I’ve read and seen from others, you end up burning through loads of different rolls trying to figure out what actually works for you, both aesthetically and technically. I’ve had some successes, but definitely more failures than I’d like to admit, especially when it comes to picking the right film stock.

That said, there are a couple I’ve come across that really stood out. One of them is the Fuji Eterna 250D, which I shot on my Olympus OM-10. Now, the OM-10 is probably my least favourite camera in my small collection, it’s not the one I naturally reach for. I have to kind of force myself to pick it up and use it. But paired with the Fuji Eterna 250D, it surprised me.

I’d had a bad experience with the Eterna 500T and had almost written off the 250D, assuming I’d get the same underwhelming results. But I decided to give it a go, just shooting locally and on a couple of work trips, and it ended up producing some of my favourite photos I’ve taken so far. The tones are muted but balanced; some colours really pop, and there’s a cinematic quality that feels understated. The saturation, too, just works for me.

It’s definitely one I’ll be using again, and I’m curious to see how it looks on my Nikon F80 next. Anyway, enjoy some of the photos below. And if you’ve used this stock before, or know any others with a similar tone or personality, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’ve been going back through a decade’s worth of images and I landed on a trip to Margate in 2017 with my kids. It was a very hot day. We left early, arriving before the main rush, and the first shots came from a car park before we made our way towards the beach. Later there were fish and chips, shared in the company of seagulls intent on stealing a bite. The first shot was the “Welcome to Dreamland” sign from that day, a fitting opener. I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I’ve enjoyed reminiscing.

So that’s it, a trip to Margate from roughly eight years ago. Hidden among the shots on an old memory card were a few gems I’d completely overlooked at the time. Going back through them has turned into a surprisingly lovely adventure: revisiting old photos, unearthing the ones I once dismissed, and finding new value in them now.

I knew it was a risk. The camera doesn’t allow me to change ISO or tweak settings beyond switching the flash on or off. For reasons I can’t explain, I decided at times not to use the flash, even though it probably would have helped. When the film came back from the lab, my first gut reaction was: oh my god. My second reaction: I actually really love these.

What I ended up with was a range of underexposed shots with odd times and textures, but something about them works

I love these photos, but I’ve also learned a lot from them. Next time I should go for a long expired roll on my SLR and something to the closer present day with my point-and-shoot (or use the flash more).

Writing this prompted me to think of all the other canals that exist up and down the country and maybe I may just set myself a challenge to walk down as man at as possible. I’m sure the kids will love that 🤣.

📍: Regent’s Canal, London

📸: Sony A7

📸: Sony A7 with 35mm 2.8 Lens

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