Shooting Film
Last summer, my dad gave me his old Nikon F2. For most of the 1970s, the F2 was the professional 35mm SLR, so I was pretty excited to be getting it. While waiting for it to arrive, I kept imagining the myriad rolls of high-contrast, black and white photos I would take with it. I could see myself, vintage camera in hand, traveling far and wide to document the plight of modern man. Visions of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans abounded.
Of course, in typical Prachi fashion, when the F2 finally arrived, I turned its knobs a bit, looked through the viewfinder for awhile, manually focused on a few items around my apartment, and finally, after a few days, put it in a drawer, where it has remained for all but the briefest moments since.
It’s not that I didn’t like it. The F2, with its all-metal body, leather strap, and chrome and faux-leather trim, was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined. And my vision of traveling the globe to photograph the human condition had lost none of its romance. No, no, my reason for stuffing that lovely machine into a drawer was much simpler than that: I was a big, fat chicken.
The Nikon F2 may be called many things, but “high tech” isn’t one of them. It was released in a time before auto-exposure modes and auto-focusing existed. It doesn’t even need a battery to work properly. It is a fully mechanical, manual focus, manual exposure camera that gives complete control to the photographer. In other words, there is no technology to use as a crutch; if I took bad photos with the F2, the blame would lie solely with me. For whatever silly reasons, I found that really intimidating.
Despite that, I never really gave up on the idea of using the F2. After spending the last few months gradually getting better at using an external light meter and getting accustomed to using manual focus lenses on my D700, I finally took the leap and shot a roll of black and white film a few weeks ago, which a friend helped me develop. Here are a few of the better shots:
Robert Frank? Dorothea Lange? Not even close. Still, there’s something that I love about these shots. The contrast, the grain, the filminess is simply beautiful in a way that digital photos—even those taken with cameras as advanced as my D700—cannot match. Will I be discarding my D700, going all analog? Of course not. But I have resolved to shoot at least one roll of film a month. I may have wasted a year on unfounded fears, but that’s behind me. In my not too distant future: the plight of modern man, in photos. Hey, a guy can dream, right?