So my best friend Danielle and I are major film geeks, and since we graduated from James Madison, we haven’t been able to live and breathe darkroom like we did for four years of our lives. While we both love digital photography and now have our own businesses, we haven’t forgotten our love and fondness for the grainy goodness of film. We decided to create this Film Fix blog to show what we are now doing with film, having graduated over a year ago! Good lord it doesn’t feel like that long ago. We are going to try, and I mean TRY our hardest, to both have posts on both of our websites every Thursday. Well Danielle will have hers done, but I will probably be procrastinating. We are going to talk about everything film including color, black and white, instant, medium format, large format, maybe even some alternative processes! We hope to inspire our readers to maybe even take up that old film camera that has been gathering dust in the attic for a few centuries. We can’t promise it will work, we can’t promise you will be successful, but that’s pretty much the beauty of film. In the age of digital photography where you can press a button and shoot, film photography requires a lot of experimentation, failure, and possibly the selling of your soul to the devil, photo gods, or whatever your film religious preference.

 

When Danielle and her husband come up to visit me on the Shore, we always go to Ocean City. These film scans are from last summer’s adventure. There are so many great and interesting things to photograph in Ocean City from the food, to the people. All of these images were shot with Fuji 400 Color Film in my Canon Rebel Film camera that I got in high school when I first got into film photography. Though the Camera is at least six years old, and one of the last Canon film models made,  I can use all of my really nice digital lenses with it because it has a standard Canon Mount. I shot about a roll and a half of film while we were there, and I included in the post my personal favorites. The photograph from Thrasher’s still makes me drool.

 

I got the images developed and processed through Rite Aid, mostly because I wanted instant gratification. Then I found out that they send the images off and you wait about a week or more, and then go and pick up your prints, scans on a CD, and negatives when it returns. I was not overly impressed with the quality, but it wasn’t terrible for the price. I’m not sure if it was the film or the processing, but a lot of the images had a very blue hue in both the prints and the scans. It was really easy to fix in Photoshop, but I’m going to pay a little more next time and have the film processed professionally. I also bought the Fuji 400 from Walmart, so it wasn’t really high quality film either. It gets the job done, and it’s great for people who want to start shooting with film again. I just sent three rolls of film off to Film Box. Two words. Can’t. Wait.

 

Well now you’ve learned a little about Danielle and I, and maybe learned a little about film. Now it’s time to look at the pictures! Make sure to check out Dani Strickler Photography for an equally awesome Film Fix Blog Post! Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, and be inspired!