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- Taxi Driver Abstract: taken with a Fuji Finepix S5100.
Meet Lady Vervaine: Like many people on Flickr, I started taking pictures with a cheap compact digital camera. I learned a lot about photography from it. I liked the fact that I could see my pictures straight away, and that I could shoot as many as I liked for no extra cost. I took about 10,000 photographs with my first digital – mainly things I saw as I walked around the streets of London.
Whenever I looked at other people’s pictures, though, I realised that what I loved most was film. It had a richness and depth that my digital never got near. But I was nervous about it – especially the idea of not being able to see my results immediately. So my first film camera was a secondhand Polaroid SX70. It’s the classic Polaroid model you may remember from your childhood: it shoots out pictures which develop in minutes, so you can see what you’ve done right away. The immediacy of it made the transition to film much easier for me – and the Pola has a magic all its own, making the most mundane things look strange and dreamlike. No other camera I’ve ever had compares to it.
After getting used to the Pola, I started using a Holga. Holgas are the ultimate in low-tech photography. They’re made of plastic and weigh almost nothing. There is a viewfinder, but it’s entirely unrelated to the lens, so you frame the picture more by instinct than by looking. You can’t change the aperture, and the focus settings are a bit of a mystery – but they use medium format film, which gives you a nice big negative, full of detail, so the images have a richness that I don’t think digital images share. They’re very cheap too; £25 will buy you a Holga!
Just lately, I’ve started to experiment with blurring and distorting my images, trying to get at something more mysterious and dreamlike. There are two main ways I do this. One is simply to adjust the focus so the result is a blissful blur. The Polaroid is particularly good for this. The other way is to put a filter over the lens, and to use various kinds of blurring substances on it. I’ve tried all sorts of things, including KY Jelly! But I think Vaseline is the best – this final image was taken with the Holga, with a Vaseline-smeared filter in front of it.
I feel I could never have made images like this with my digital camera; and that I’m only at the beginning of discovering what film can do. It’s a very exciting journey, and a lot less scary than I thought… So if you like the look of film, but haven’t quite got it together to try shooting any yet – then go do it now – you won’t look back!!!
If you haven’t joined our flickr pool yet – get snappy! We’re running a really grown-up competition at the moment with gallery space ‘n’ all – you can enter here.
