Today I took the 35mm Canon AE-1 out for a spin. I had way too much gear on my body but I found myself roaming the streets with a thirst I hadn't felt in a long, long time. My right hand firmly gripped the Canon and refused to let go. A Chinese branded Pan 400 black and white film stock with about six frames remaining in it, of which my girlfriend had mostly shot as I had been spinning the digital shutter over the past few months. I love film, but I somewhat fell out of love with it for a while. Perhaps the cost of film, and the cost of development. The love I have for the vintage lenses I don't have adapted to the Canon FD mount.
I roamed the streets on the earlier Halloween evening. I tried my hand at a bit of range focusing in which you set the aperture alongside a certain distance of focus which means everything up to that point should ideally remain in focus, allowing you to be quick on your toes and not mess around with focusing in the moment. It doesn't have the same reliability on a 50mm focal length lens, but I tried anyway. I found myself sometimes shifting the focus a little bit but that may have been me not quite paying attention to the distance I had set in already. I loved it. I loved that rapid movement, it's something I love with digital, but with film it felt new.
The sound of the weighty shutter punching with every press. The quick wind of film that followed. This is what I fell in love with film for way back when I first started photography. The mechanical feeling of it all. Knowing that I could make mistakes and not entirely know. And later when the film is developed will I notice those mistakes and learn to adapt. I missed that heavy camera body, the sounds it threw out and how it felt like I was really engaged with the camera itself. That the two work together to take the final image. I mentioned I mostly use vintage lenses these days, and manual focusing is something I still have to do with those on the Sony. And I think it's something I'm pretty good at doing quite quickly. But the Canon just felt different.
This revived something within me. I won't be putting the digital camera aside anytime soon. I'm still loving the ways I'm pushing myself with it, and I have a few more vintage lenses I'd love to buy and adapt with the Sony. But I definitely feel that I'll be buying more film and shooting it. Maybe search for a cheap rangefinder with a wider focal length to optimise the street photography style I love. I shot a protest against Halloween in the heart of Yerevan. Where young teens dressed in makeup and costumes danced with joy around them, not caring the alleged Satanist celebration the Jehovah’s Witnesses implied. I shot people being interviewed. People in costumes. And the various things of notice that I found with the many steps I took throughout the city. I'm looking forward to sharing those, though these images are instead some leftovers as of late that I didn't share.
I think this was inevitable, something laying in wait for a long time. Where film was always the type of photography I would gravitate to. That I did miss. I just didn't quite realise how much I did miss it. Film is punishing, it's liberating, and it's just great fun. Perhaps it's time to challenge myself yet again, in another way. To find ways to push film stock to its limits here in Yerevan. To try some things few others are doing here.
