Revisiting Old Hobbies: Film Photography

I am a film camera enthusiast. I have at least 10 analog cameras – ranging from polaroid cameras to toy cameras (lomography) to SLRs (I’ll get to defining those in a separate post). But I have been out of the game for a while. I stopped collecting after I got my first range finder (scroll down to read more) and also because I started traveling nonstop and couldn’t set money aside for my film collection.

While I was decluttering my room, I realized how much dust my film cameras have been collecting so I wanted to do something about that.

Beauty of Shooting Film

1. Surprises. With film, you don’t get to have a preview of what you just shot. You would need to wait until you’ve exhausted the film roll (minimum 24 shots) and then have the film processed (or process it yourself). 
2. Learning. With DSLRs, we tend to learn photography through trial and error. Not having the digital aspect in shooting film forces you to learn things the harder way. 
3. It’s pretty cool. While I do love digital photography, there’s just really something about a film photo like the graininess, the vignette, the saturation. Once you get the hang of things, your photos can look like Instagram-filtered photos. 

Sample Photos

Restarting and Gaining Back Momentum

Revisiting an old hobby is tough sometimes but as I think about it, it would be a great idea for me to go back to shooting film (even not professionally). These cameras aren’t meant to be crammed in a drawer or stored in a shelf. I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars collecting these things so why not use them again? I’m still passionate about it but I want to have the same momentum that I have with other hobbies such as bullet journaling and blogging. 

A few ideas:

1. Incorporating in my bullet journal. I am planning on creating a collection page for the film settings that I used for each film roll. This is an old practice that I used to do when I was learning film photography on an SLR. 
2. Joining a challenge. There is still a film photography community out there so I am sure there is something going around. If I do find it, I will start participating.  
3. Creating a challenge. If there are no challenges out there (I doubt that there isn’t), then I’d have to create prompts or themes for myself to follow.
4. Bring a film camera at all times. This shouldn’t be a big deal because most of my toy cameras are light. If I always have my camera at hand, then I’d be able to commit to the challenges that I’ll be participating in. 
5. Just do it already. Lol, I know. Yes. After this thing’s been published.