Will Robb Photography

Up until 4 years ago I only ever used film. Once I started to use digital, film sadly started to become missing from my life. Digital is great to work with, it’s fast, reliable, simple to edit and it keeps costs down once you have your equipment. However, I do sometimes miss film and the joy it gave me when I was starting out.

When I started to take photographs it was on film. I was living in the UK, I started to travel overseas to Asia and South America and I always took a small compact 35mm camera. When I got back from each trip I was so excited waiting to get my negatives back and choose which images I wanted to print. When I wasn’t happy with my job in London, I decided to take my photography “hobby” more seriously and went to school at weekend to learn how to print and develop. I bought my first SLR camera, a fairly low level canon 450e which helped me learn about shutter speeds, aperture values, iso’s and all things I used to think were technical. I thought a lot more about photography, went to a lot of exhibitions, pored over books and really became hooked on the joy of photography.

When I had finally had enough of my life in the UK and found a job in Japan to escape to, I sold everything I owned and gave away the rest of my belongings no one would buy. All I took with me on that plane to Tokyo was a few items of clothing and my camera. Everything else I wanted to forget about, my camera was the only thing from my old life I felt worth bringing. In my first few years here in Japan photography was the best thing in my life. Like so many others, I taught English by day, but at weekends and on holidays I was off out to new places and my camera was always with me. I found Tokyo to be a photographers mecca, there was so much to see and do (and hence photograph), there was so much camera equipment for sale at cheap prices compared to the UK and all the big camera stores had rows of cabinets full of different kinds of film, lots I had never heard of before and I was keen to use them all. I started shooting slide film and found I had to use different techniques from regular print film. Quite quickly I learned about cross-processing and got really into that for about 2 or 3 years (much to the dismay of my local camera store owners who couldn’t understand why I wanted to “ruin” good negatives by processing slide film with print chemicals). I increased my camera collection, I got a compact ricoh GR1s, an old Olympus SLR, a pile of lenses for my canon and then I found an old Rollieflex in a fleamarket and cleaned it up and got into using medium format film. I bought an LCA compact 35mm and a medium format Holga and got wild with my cross processing. A pile of cameras, lots of money spent on film, but everywhere I went I had at least 2 cameras with me and everyday, no mater where I was going or what I had planned, with my cameras at hand every day was an adventure in photography, even if I was just on a train to work I would photograph the people riidng along with me. After work and on days off I would wander new streets and photograph quite literally everything I came across.

I’m surprised I had enough money to pay for everything. In those days photos were just for me, they were personal and fun, but then I started doing some small exhibitions, selling prints and getting some jobs here and there for magazines and I guess I got to thinking more and more about increasing my paid photo work. I was getting asked to do jobs with a quick turnover, shoot and send images the same day which required a DSLR and I was having to turn down those jobs and I saw them going to people who had “turned digital” which was something I was trying to avoid, but eventually I bit the bullet as it were and got my first DSLR about 4 years ago. An 8 megapixel canon EOS 30D and a 17-40mm f.4L lens that was paid for with a handful of big jobs I got. Then I could start doing a lot more work more easily, soon I needed to upgrade and I got a canon 5D and a couple of new L series lenses (24-70 f.28L and 80-200 f.28L) and my 30D became my backup. Then I got more and more work requiring images shot in cameras over a certain megapixel rating so my 30D became obsolete and I upgraded to a 5D mk II and my 5D became backup. In amongst constantly upgrading my digital equipment I stopped using film so much. I had bought a Mamiya 7II medium format camera with a (surprisingly wide) 65mm lens and I was taking it out with me on some jobs up until last year, it was even in my bag when I traveled, but I just wasn’t using it. Film started to come second fiddle. I was selling my digital images and they got priority, so more often than not, by the time I was satisfied with my digital shots I was too tired to think about film. I used it once this year I think, to photograph Erochika Bamboo which I blogged about earlier. The finished roll of film is still in my fridge. Before that I used it traveling in Scotland, London and Paris last year. I was away for a month, but only shot about 5 rolls (50 shots) on it. I started scanning some of the images today, but got frustrated by it taking too long and still getting images with small hairs or the likes on my negs. I had just edited and captioned about 50 digital images before that over about 3 hours, then in an hour of scanning my negs I got 2 images with little hairs and dust particles on them.

One of the last images I shot with my Mamiya was last year at a festival I photographed. I shot mostly digital that day, I got some really nice images, but my favourite was one I shot on my Mamiya, one of only about 6 frames at the end of the day. It was a “hadaka matsuri” (naked festival) which basically involved men in loincloths fighting in a rice field. It was an interesting day, the men fought each other in a friendly manner in the cold spring afternoon and ran back and forth to a nearby temple to drink sake and warm themselves by a bonfire. By the end of the day when I got my mamiya out, everyone was exhausted and I captured a nice moment. This is just a small version of the image here, but the original scan is something like 8000 by 6900 pixels, a massive file that is so sharp I could probably print it more than 2 meters and it would still be sharp as a pin. I really love the feel of film, it is expensive, it’s becoming harder to come by, it’s a pain to scan or print, but it’s so beautiful. Rather than just thinking about photos for work all the time, I want to start shooting a little bit of film again, just to keep my hand in and the old world of film I learned about photography in, and also to keep some things about photography personal as well as professional.