My Film Photography

Street photography on film in Mexico City

Most of the film photography on this page was made on the streets of Mexico City.

Mexico City is where I really developed as a street photographer, and for a period I carried a film camera almost everywhere.

Film changed the way I photographed the street.

Not necessarily because it made the photographs better.

It made me pick them better.

With digital, taking another frame costs nothing. With film, every time you press the shutter, one of the photographs on the roll is gone.

That sounds incredibly obvious, but you feel it when you're walking around.

You start asking yourself whether this is actually the moment.

Maybe you wait another two seconds.

Maybe the person takes another step.

Maybe two things in the frame suddenly come together.

It brought me closer to the idea of the decisive moment that Henri Cartier-Bresson made famous.

Not because film magically gives you Cartier-Bresson's timing. I wish.

But you become very aware that you have one frame and you want to use it well.

Why I started shooting black and white film

I have shot both color and black and white film, but at some point I decided I wanted to focus almost completely on black and white.

So I bought around 30 boxes of Kodak Tri-X.

Which, when you think about it, is slightly insane.

If I had bought color film, I could always convert the photographs to black and white later. If I shoot Tri-X, there is no button that gives me the color back.

But that was exactly why I did it.

I wanted the limitation.

I didn't want to walk around wondering whether something would work better in color.

The decision had already been made before I left home.

I had black and white film in the camera, so I had to see in black and white.

That focus became an important part of my photography and eventually my black and white work in general.

Film isn't only about the finished look for me. Sometimes the useful part is removing choices.

My first film camera was a Canon AE-1

I started shooting film around six years ago because a friend told me I should try it.

My first camera was a Canon AE-1.

I fell for film almost immediately.

There wasn't some big intellectual reason behind it. It was simply exciting.

You take the photographs and then you don't have them.

You have to wait.

When the scans finally arrive, you get to see photographs you almost forgot making.

There are disappointments, obviously. Missed focus. Bad exposures. A photograph that was much better in your imagination than it was on the negative.

But occasionally you get a perfectly exposed frame back and there is something about it that I still don't think feels quite the same as digital.

I have a separate guide to film photography if you're here because you want to learn about cameras, exposure, film stocks and actually shooting analog. This page is mostly about the work itself.

My Rolleiflex 2.8F changed things again

When I got my first big commission for Facebook, I celebrated by buying a Rolleiflex 2.8F.

Completely reasonable financial decision.

The Rolleiflex changed the way I photographed again.

It's medium format, but the format isn't actually the thing I remember most.

It's how you hold it.

You look down into the waist-level finder instead of bringing a camera up in front of your face.

That fits me.

It feels careful.

Quiet.

Slow.

The Rolleiflex 2.8F is also the camera I associate heavily with Vivian Maier. Looking down into that square finder gives you a very different relationship with both the frame and the person in front of you.

And people seem to like the camera.

Almost everyone I ask for a street portrait with the Rolleiflex says yes.

Photographers come up to me just to talk about it.

It looks old enough that people understand something unusual is happening, but it doesn't feel aggressive. You're looking down at the camera rather than pointing a giant lens directly into someone's face.

I've even mounted a GoPro underneath the Rolleiflex, using the tripod mount, so I can record my point of view while shooting it for my videos.

An old medium format camera with a GoPro hanging underneath is probably not what Rolleiflex had in mind.

But it works.

Color film photography

I do shoot color film too.

Mostly Kodak Portra 400 and Kodak ColorPlus.

Portra 400 is probably the obvious one. Beautiful skin tones, forgiving exposure and a look that works extremely well for people.

But if you gave me a camera and told me to choose, I'd probably load black and white.

I don't normally leave home knowing exactly what I'm going to photograph.

That's the street photography part of it.

You walk out and see what happens.

So for me the film stock is less about matching a roll to a planned subject and more about deciding how I want to see before I start.

Commercial film photography for Facebook and Burger King

Film eventually moved from my personal street photography into commissioned work.

And interestingly, I don't normally have to convince an art director to use it.

They ask.

A lot of art directors love film right now, and I've had clients ask me up front whether part of a campaign can be photographed on analog.

I understand why.

I'm often hired because clients want authenticity and something that feels less manufactured. Analog photography is a very obvious way of committing to that.

But I also don't want to bullshit anyone about film.

If a digital photograph is shot and edited properly, I don't think most people could reliably look at the finished image and tell you whether it was made on film or digital.

Film isn't magic.

The process is different.

And sometimes the fact that it really was shot on film matters to the project.

I've shot analog commercially for Facebook, and film has also been part of my work for Burger King.

The Burger King Non Artificial Mexico campaign later won three Cannes Lions. Most of that campaign was photographed digitally, with a smaller part shot on film, so I don't want to pretend it was an all-analog campaign.

But film made sense inside it.

The entire idea was built around authenticity, real people and removing the artificial. That is also basically the reason art directors ask me to shoot analog.

My broader approach to this kind of work is on my commercial street photography portfolio.

I went too far with film

There was a period where I became so interested in film that digital photography started feeling cheap to me.

Almost not real.

I don't remember exactly when that happened. Probably a year or so after I started shooting analog.

And that was a mistake.

I became pretentious about it.

I hated that.

The camera and the process had started becoming more important than the photograph.

Now I'm very happy shooting a lot of digital again.

There are things I love about film, and there are things digital does unbelievably well.

If I'm experimenting with slow shutter speeds, for example, in the way Alexey Titarenko used long exposures, digital is an amazing tool.

You can experiment.

Fail.

Change something.

Try again.

With film you might wait days to discover that the clever experiment you had in your head was twelve blurry frames of absolutely nothing.

There is value in both.

Film or digital doesn't matter that much

There is still something about getting a perfectly exposed film photograph back that I love.

A good negative has something physical about it.

And then there's the other side.

Film gives you out-of-focus photographs too.

Sometimes the person was perfect, the moment was perfect and you missed focus.

Congratulations. Very authentic.

That's the trade-off.

Today I'm much less interested in arguing about whether analog or digital is better.

It's the picture.

The subject.

The emotion.

That's the part that matters.

Film can change how I work. It can slow me down. It can make me cherish a frame more. The Rolleiflex can change how a stranger responds to me. Tri-X can force me to stop thinking about color.

Those things are real.

But none of them can rescue an uninteresting photograph.

Hire me as a film photographer

I still shoot both 35mm and medium format film, in black and white and color.

For commercial projects I can work entirely on film, entirely digital, or combine the two depending on what the campaign actually needs.

If you're an art director, creative agency, brand or publication looking for a film photographer, particularly for documentary, street, portrait or commercial work, I'm available for selected commissions.

You can see the rest of my photography portfolio, my commercial street photography or contact me about a project.

If analog makes sense for the idea, I'll shoot analog.

If digital makes more sense, I'll shoot digital.

The picture comes first.