Starting with analog photography

A conversation at the airport

An airplane from Swiss airlines approaching Zurich airport

I was excited to meet a friend from my childhood. I was on my way to departure Zurich airport shortly after he arrived there to visit Zurich. We caught up and an interesting conversation about photography and one bit kept ringing in my head for a while afterwards:

I stoppped with photography when it became digital. I think analog photography has a special kind of feeling to it. Everyone should try analog photography, I think.
― My friend Thomas

This struck me by surprise. I’ve only took photos on film back when I was around 6 years old. That’s a long time ago. And I have to admit: It wasn’t fun. You’d take a bunch of pictures, hand the film to mum, she’d take it to the local drugstore and a few weeks later, you’d get photos back. And most of them weren’t very good. That felt frustrating and it was relatively expensive.

No wonder, I only used two or three rolls of film back then. One on the red camera we had (I have no idea which manufacturer or model) and the older-looking Kodak camera from my mother. I found out it was an Instamatic 200 or 300, I’ll see if we still have it.

I felt like I missed the point of it, back then. I was a child, I had no idea what I was doing. Time to give it another chance.

Monkey see, monkey do

After our conversation, in which Nikon came up a couple of times, I went and bought a used Nikon F70 with a 28-80mm, f/3.5-5.6 AF-D lens. Why this one? Because it was available and very, very cheap. I didn’t really do much research but I was happy to see that the camera hits the sweet spot for me: It feels solid, but not heavy, it’s handy and it takes pretty good pictures.

Next up was finding some film. The cheapest, most readily available options for me were Illford FP4plus (ISO 125) and HP5plus (ISO 400). I read online that they’re quite forgiving, pretty fine-grained films with good contrast, so I thought “this might be my best bet” and bought some rolls.

Nikon F70 with 28-80mm lens with some Illford FP4 plus and HP5 plus rolls next to it

I also worried about the delay of having to send the film to a lab, wait for it and then find out I screwed up my first analog film adventure. Plus, it turns out, getting films developed is quite costly. Looking around, I found that developing black&white film and having the negatives scanned cost around 20 CHF per roll and takes a couple of days up to a week-ish.

Then I found this video:

This immediately got me excited. I bought this development tank and a smartphone negative scanner as well. Here is my kit:

The lomography daylight development tank together with the smartphone negative scanner and the Ars Imago monobath

I also bought a monobath developer (which means: Developer and Fixer are integrated into a single solution), because it’s the simplest chemical to develop film with. It does take away flexibility and a few creative options, but I think it’s fine for a start. My first goal is getting it done, then iterate to get better at it.

Shooting my first roll of film

Alright, I’m hyped! I can’t wait to shoot a couple of photos and then try my hand at development, so time to take the camera out for a walk! I went to town, literally. Walking through Zurich on a sunny day presented plenty of opportunities for photography, so the first roll of film filled up rather quickly.

Enjoying the sunshine at Schanzengraben in Zurich Panorama of the old town of Zurich on both banks of the Limmat river as seen from Central The Observatory in Zurich A glimpse across the river onto the city of Zurich

Fraumünster church tower in Zurich Grossmünster with its iconic towers in Zurich An old roadster car in Zurich, surrounded by fascinated people A black old timer parked in Zurich

I noticed, that the way I take photos changed. As it’s a black and white film, I have to focus on subject, composition and contrast. I want my photos to tell a story and this time, colour isn’t a way to express something. While seemingly limiting, it is inspiring and sparks creativity. It changed the way I look at things around me.

Analog photography is also slower and more deliberate. I like that. I take my time to set up the shot, I think a lot more about the photo than I do with digital. Digital photography is a loop of setting up the shot, shooting, checking the result and possibly retaking the photo. This loop is broken in analog photography and that is liberating.

A modern highrise building Schanzengraben from Löwenplatz In front of one of the Google offices in Zurich

An astronaut spacesuit hanging from the ceiling Another modern highrise building

As you can see, some of the photos have weird lines across, but not all of them. I thought, I might have screwed up my first run of development, but speaking to a few friends, they all mentioned that development screw-ups are more blurry, shaded, not this sharp. They pointed out that it’s likely an optical problem with the camera. It might have been me mishandling the camera or something on the lens, but I found a cheap replacement lens and noticed a scratch on the original lens. After switching the lens, the lines disappeared. Still not sure, what exactly the problem was.

The first time developing my own film

Back home I was super excited to put the film into the Lomography daylight development tank and getting it developed with the monobath I bought from Ars Imago. Retrieving the film with the film retriever tool that was in the set with the tank was easy enough, spooling it onto the reel worked flawlessly and it was time to do the development. Pouring in the mix of monobath and water, putting the lid on the tank, agitating for 30 seconds, then inverting it twice every minute for 8 minutes was easy and didn’t take too long. As I poured out the monobath and filled the tank with fresh water to clean the film, I was excited and a bit scared to have possibly ruined the roll of film. But as I unraveled the film from the spool I already saw some of the negatives and got very excited to see them once they’re dry. Hanging them to dry felt like putting up your stocking for christmas.

The first roll of film after development, hanging to dry

This was pure magic. I pressed the shutter a few hours ago. Now I did a bit of fiddling and poured some chemicals in a box and, voila, I have created a physical representation of a moment. Somehow it feels amazing to capture something, to freeze a story in a single picture - and then make it something you can touch and feel. This is a big part of the magic of analog photography to me.

Scanning - surprisingly annoying

Once the film had dried, I took to my smartphone scanner. This turned out to be a bit annoying. Getting my phone aligned was finicky and I could never get the negative fully aligned, no matter what I tried.

A negative as captured by my smartphone

The circle would not properly align, but the negative was pretty much entirely visible on the picture, so I didn’t bother much. I scanned the roll, then inverted the histogram and voila, the photos came out.

Processing a scanned negative in GIMP

It was a bit tedious. Align each negative, take picture on smartphone, repeat. Then use an app or program to rotate, crop, invert. There are apps that help with that, I think, but it was still finicky and a bit annoying. But hey, I got my physical photos in a format that I could show to others and share digitally, nice.

What I would have done differently

Overall, I’m very happy. The first roll of film got me decent photos (I somehow expected a catastrophe, so, yay!), development was pretty easy and smooth, not nearly as tricky or tedious as I feared and I had a rush from seeing my photos appear on the film.

Scanning pissed me off though. I would not get a smartphone scanner again. I would go for something that either uses a proper DSLR, a flatbed scanner or a specialised scanning device, I think.

What’s next?

Well, I’ll do more of this! I want to try different film stock (I already bought some Cinestill XX), I want to get better at handling my Nikon camera, I wanna try other cameras, do better in development of my film and eventually give colour a go.