Change, I am into it dude….. but alas, others sink in quicksand until their hand, grasping to ‘yesterday’ which has by now, sunk below the sand line. So , what has been blossoming in my mind? Different film brands…. My latest roll which I shot this morning and just processed this afternoon, was a Svema Black and White 400. Those old Ruskie’s are at it again.
Off the bat in the development process I noticed a few things. First, the negative itself is ultra thin on the Svema film….when compared to a more normal Kodak TriX. This thinness makes it difficult to load onto the spool and I had to take care to not cause a rip or notch in the negative roll, making it impossible to roll onto the spool. Also, the film, as one winds it on the spool, has this inherent crinkly-like sound, much like some of those baby rattles that have crinkly material attached to excite the little critter.
Once wound….it takes twice as long to develop at 1+1 going the distance at 20 min instead of 9-12 minutes for TriX. But since I am AA (Anal for Analog), I found I ate up up those extra minutes and enjoyed the tactile nature of agitating a film tank for an additional 10 minutes. I told you…AA. The more I can postpone scanning the film and entering the strange world of the digital peeps, the more attuned I feel to the entire process.
Oh, let me mention uniqueness. The film type renders a unique look. Listen folks….don’t listen to those subscriber hungry You Tuber’s who speak to the film camera itself as if ‘it’ is the missing variable in the world of unique image play. The camera is just a box man. It takes the image and that’s it. Nada mas (at least in the film mode), although, yes….some film cameras are more advanced with Spot Metering or having an Exposure dial but those are not the norm. Even the infamous Leica M3 or the newer version Leica MA, lack those features. So that unique look really comes down to the film itself + lens selection + your own skills playing with the exposure triangle. Not sure what that is? Look it up……
So given my lean towards film experimentation, in the past few weeks I have used Kodak TriX, Fomapan, Kino Monolit, Lomograph Berlin Kino, Arista and now Svema. I like it….oddity. Uniqueness. Un-norm-like. Some might even state some of my images as ‘errors’ or faulty film or bad image taking etc… Heck, who cares.