I don’t know niche or common my way of doing things is but I thought I’d share my photography experience and process for fun. I started taking pictures with a digital camera years ago (3 megapixels YAY!). I remember taking 2 hour trips to get downtown and just snap at everything and anything on a busy downtown street - some of that may still be in my flickr somewhere. Anyways, after I’d filled it’s massive 256mb CF card, I’d sort the pictures into to folders and then online. Later after getting a mac and going to China (I forget which came first), I used iPhoto and was amazed at how much better you could make photos look with some simple tweaking. That saturation slider wowed me good. Those were pretty asinine days.

So to fast forward a bit, I wanted to try this ‘film’ thing people were saying was dead to get that whole ‘bokeh’ thing a digicam couldn’t do. I got a cheap olympus OM1 SLR and back then it was all about f/1.8! 50mm! Shoot everything wide open and aspire to art! Those were pretty nerdy times. When Apple released Aperture, I jumped on it right away, “Look at how pro it looks - and shiny!” I probably exclaimed in my head. I learned everything about it and all it’s many fancy settings and all was well. Then Adobe Lightroom came out and I switched over because it had better image editing and it could actually run on my computer. Unfortunately, even today, it’s image organizing sucks balls; you’re constantly going from ‘develop’ mode to ‘library’ mode where you can only use some features of the program in each mode, and metadata things like picture titles and descriptions are buried and annoying to use.

So for the longest while, I’ve been constantly switching between the two programs, never really satisfied with either. As a consequence, half my photos are in Aperture and the other in Lightroom and I have no idea which ones are in which because I’ve switched so often :@ . I ended up relying on Flickr to look through my own photos. This sucks for two reasons, firstly that browsing lots of photos online is slow and more annoying. But secondly and more important is that it’s my own photos that teach me and encourage me to keep going and try new things. Looking at other peoples photos is fun and educational too, but you either start feeling intimidated by their skill/equipment/etc. and feel you need the same, or you feel hopeless. Inspired by others who enjoy a more analogue and tactile process, I also tried making 4×6 prints. These turned out fantastically good, but I had no real way to share theme or organize and transport too many. Trying to scan the negatives myself of those rolls (to save money) also went nowhere, I used a Minolta film scanner at UofT and it was craptacular - I wasted three hours and had a single roll of film scanned that looked like dandruffy crap to show for it. Never again. In short, what I’m trying to say is that without being able to easily enjoy the fruits of your own labour, you will burn out.

Today, I only use mainly one camera, a Ricoh GR1v film camera which is a quirky little magnesium guy with excellent metering, perfect (to me) ergonomics and a fast but mentally retarded AF system. I really enjoy using it. I also like to think that if Ricoh Camera Japan had a corporate slogan it would be something like “RICOH: We make weird little cameras for weird people like you.”

So after shooting a roll of film with my Ricoh I get the roll developed and scanned onto a CD. Unfortunately, I don’t live in a world city like Tokyo or Paris, so finding a good developer here in Toronto is a real trial and error kind of challenge. When I started out in Scarberia, I used the Fuji place at PMall which did it all for 5$ in an hour or so. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for and later I also tried much better labs downtown. I’ve tried Aden Camera, Downtown Camera and a couple others but wasn’t really happy until I found a small, friendly and high quality place called ElPro Photo which charges about 9$ a roll to develop and scan. Basically, a good way to tell if a developer is good is if they sell or develop medium format (120 size) film - if they do or at least know what it is then they’ll be less likely to half-ass it.

With the CD I get back, I put it into a university computer or Cara’s iMac to transfer to my computer (my Macbook Air doesn’t have a CD drive). I’ve rediscovered the simplicity of iPhoto again. Because the film developer does most of the major image adjustments (I like ElPro because they keep the photo as neutral as possible), all I do in iPhoto is small tweaks. Usually I just click the magic wand thing and adjust the shadows (film has deeper blacks than digital and iPhoto doesn’t understand that so you have to always keep it in check). I import my scanned film into iphoto one roll at a time, which creates an event that I name with the camera and the film I was using as well as any important tips or characteristics I’m seeing from the film. So for example, “GR1 - Agfacolour 100 Ultra (expired: yellow tendency, highlight blowout, underexposed high grain)“. I do it this way because on a single roll of film you may have lots of little things going on like 5 shots of a birthday party and others which are just daily life. Obviously separating these small events would just be too much time and clutter. But more importantly I like to think that every camera and every film has it’s own unique charm and character. It’s just how I remember and think about them, so organizing them this way and chronologically makes perfect sense in my head.

One other thing I do in iPhoto as I edit, is that I using star ratings to keep of track of the ones I like. Things I rate as 1 star, usually half the roll, are crappy pictures that I’ll either hide or delete. That way when I scroll around looking at my past work for inspiration to keep moving forward, I see only my better stuff and not let all the mistakes and regrets of the past keep me down. So to illustrate, my iPhoto looks like this (except bigger):

Now the final challenge is how to get it all into Flickr. I used to upload them one by one over a long period of time to not overwhelm people, but I guess that kind of nothing and then lots rhythm is just a part of shooting film so I figure I won’t worry about it so much. Within iPhoto, Apple now has a Flickr export function which is really simple to use and syncs metadata both ways which is cool. However it has a lot of flaws and weird design decisions which make it only useful to people who shoot film rolls, and to people who only use a camera for special events (birthdays, vacations, etc.) and for nothing else.

* I think I’m kind of a hypocrite, because on one hand I say dSLRS are too big and on the other I secretly would love to own a Leica MP or Contax G2 camera. But those ones are pretty and I’m shallow!

(Sorry for the length, I had in mind a much shorter article but it just kept going on and on …)

p.s. The Ceci N’est Pas Une Mixtape by Kitsune Noir is fantastically good. Very Paris, Very Classy.