The Beast

I don’t think I’ve written anything about cameras for a while so I thought I’d post some of my thoughts from recently changing from shooting mostly digital to film. As some of you may know I have a Leica M8 also and recently tried my hand at shooting film. I started out with Canons, L series lenses and tilt shift lenses but moved on to rangefinders and medium format. I have since progressed to owning mostly film cameras now (after selling one of my Leica M8′s) and have chosen film as the medium for our new wedding photography business. The reason isn’t because I think film rules the world and digital can kiss my a** (although the look of film can never be achieved with digital) , it’s because of how rewarding it is to shoot film and the ease of the work flow. Starting out our new business the first thing I thought about was do I really want to be editing around 1000 photos after a wedding? But knowing me, I am obsessive about every detail and I knew I would just spend way to long going through editing all of the photos. I also wouldn’t have charged the clients extra for editing as there is no way I could deliver a product that I felt wasn’t the best I could give them.

So, I thought long and hard about digital versus film and came to the decision that spending hours in front of a computer wasn’t how I wanted to start my business off. The great thing about having a film / digital hybrid work flow is how easy it is to achieve beautiful results without thinking “what am I going to do to this RAW file to make it look good?”. Everything is controlled in the camera at the time of shooting, which made me think a lot more about what I was actually photographing. All the film photos on my blog here and on my website are exactly what I got back from the professional lab without any editing. It’s great that I will be able to offer a client a beautiful consistent product guaranteed every time, not a product that doesn’t fit together because I processed some photos with different actions in Photoshop. Also the benefit is that my clients will be able to keep their film negatives for generations without the worry of only having digital files that may become corrupted or unreadable. But they will also get these digital files from high resolution scans put onto disc as everyone still wants digital.

So, back to the camera! The M7 is quite similar to the digital M8 whereby it has a light meter built in, it also has an aperture priority mode which I often use. The shutter on the M7 though is whisper quiet, something that I absolutely love. The way the M7 captures candid portraits is amazing, half of the time the person doesn’t even realize they’re being photographed which makes for really natural photos. If you’ve never shot a rangefinder then I definitely recommend it and if you’re one of my friends feel free to use any of my cameras when I see you next. The Leica M7 being a film camera handles high contrast situations a lot better than the M8 digital does. When I shoot a similar scene the M8 digital fails to capture the latitude of light, whereas when I get the film back it captures a much wider dynamic range. Details are still there in the shadows, and the highlights aren’t too blown out like digital. I’m not saying you shouldn’t shoot digital because most people would rather not “spend money” on developing film because digital is “free”. But, if you think about it if you’re buying a new digital camera every 2 years which you will as it’ll become outdated by then, it’s not so “free” after all. If you feel like saying, “You’re an idiot for shooting film”, or, “You’re such a try hard wannabe Cartier Bresson” then please feel free to leave a comment! Pictured: Leica M7 with Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f/1.1. Shot with: Leica M8, Leica Summicron 90mm f/2.