Photographing childhood on film | Summer ‘23
I’ve been meaning to try photographing with film for a while. Several years ago, my dad gave me some of his old, expired rolls of 35mm film he had leftover from his days of shooting film. Old film from around 20 years or more; a mixture of Kodak Gold and Fujicolor Superia. I had no idea if they were still usable, but I knew I couldn’t throw them away. I still love the nostalgia of coming across old photographs captured in the heydays of film photography. I wrote about what sparked my own interest in photography in this post a while back.
It’s more than the sentimentality of looking back at old film photos for why I wanted to try photographing with film again. There’s a quality about them that is hard to explain - grainy and imperfect in the sense that the photographs can be left as they are once produced. There is no need to do any further editing, it’s as authentic as the moment we clicked the shutter on the camera. The photographs have a depth to them that tells a story. It’s not to say you cannot do some minor adjustments on the images, which I have done in the ones below. After all, I was using expired film stock which I later found have lost a bit of colour when I finally got the film scans back.
There is another reason, one more pertinent I think, and why I picked up the camera in the first place, which for full disclosure, it wasn’t for making client photos. It was the chance to document our daily lives, my kids’ childhood, their experiences and the moments observed. I wanted to have tangible documentation to show how we felt and existed in those moments. It was a way to give my kids a sense of belonging, to see in the photographs the nuances of our everyday in their childhood, our adventures, and the love and joy that went into raising them from tiny humans.
Lately, I realised I had gotten lazy with picking up the camera other than for making, editing and delivering photos to my clients. I also noticed that I’ve become distracted by other task-oriented things like unloading/reloading the washing, planning for the meals ahead or school and club dates we needed to make, as well as checking emails or updating social media. Some of which are necessities to our daily lives, but doesn’t entirely let us live in the moment. It means I have less time to spend documenting my own children and, even if I did, then it was through stolen snapshots quickly captured on my phone. Not that there’s anything wrong with capturing photos on your phone, but they are not the heirloom photos I would have framed or hang on the walls unlike those I’ve taken with my camera where I’m likely to create tangible documentation from the moments we have.
Photographs are made to tell stories, celebrating my children for who they are in this season of childhood and the narrative of our daily life. If I’ve become distracted then it feels like I’m missing out on all the good and important stuff in their lives. But, how do I stay present and be a party to my kids’ experiences while trying to freeze the moments into pictures at the same time?
The answer I found was in photographing film with my Nikon F3 - an old 35mm film camera I had purchased second-hand online last autumn and had taken on a few trials earlier this year. Shooting film allows me to put down the camera after making a photo and return quickly to the moments I was having with my kids at the time. I wasn’t being sucked into constantly checking the image I had just taken on the back of my camera or on the phone. Since I already had the film stock that my dad had given to me from years ago, I also knew that I could experiment with shooting film. I wasn’t needing to worry about perfection and wondering if I had made a good photo, especially as it’s been many years since I have shot with film.
This summer was to be full of promises: I wanted to be intentional, remove distractions of social media, embrace living in the moment with my still relatively small humans. I did it, my kids had my time fully. And we have everlasting photographs to show for it.