My first ever film roll
I've always been a visual-oriented person. I first realised this as a kid looking through photographs my dad took of me in an even younger age and being mesmerised about how everything in those pictures just "fit together".
I remember looking at a particular picture of me holding a lollipop and wearing a cap. I'm sure that picture is not special by any technical means - it was shot with standard consumer-grade film available at the time with whatever point-and-shoot was popular at the time. Despite this, it was the first time I remember seeing an intentional depiction of myself and feeling something I would today describe as nostalgia. I, of course, had absolutely no idea what that picture made me feel, but I reminisced on the day my uncle bought a lollipop for me and each of my cousins just before the blue hour on a cool autumn day.
This, of course, could very well have been complete bullshit. There is a significant chance I am making this all up and you will never know - in fact, I will never know. See, this is where photographs really shine for me. They are to my memories what an anchor is to a ghost ship. I am not quite certain it was afternoon when that photo was taken, or even if my uncle was the one who bought me that lollipop. For all I knew, seasons didn't really exist until I first set foot outside of Brazil. But I know it happened: at some time, with someone.
Immigration and the lack of scarcity
After an eventful last couple years of medical school, I pivoted my career to software engineering and moved to London. If you ever experienced stepping foot in London you will describe this city as photogenic, and it's not just my newcomer rose-tinted glasses talking. The old city has this delicate mix of centuries-old buildings and massive glass high-rises. Every borough has its own personality, with some being ridden with beautiful Georgian-era houses and some being marked by reassuring grittiness (something I strangely miss coming from Brazil). It's a bit hard not to want to photograph every single cute storefront, canal, fence or cathedral you come across. And that is what I did.
In fact, that is what I have always done. Not just in London, but everywhere I went. Most of us, armed with a powerful pocket camera called an iPhone, have been doing that for more than a decade. Not so strangely, this causes a sort of indifference towards any particular photo I took. Any of them are just as perfect, crisp and special as the other thousands stored in my 256GB mobile.
At some point, some misguided individuals - for a lack of a better word - attempted to create artificial value by introducing "scarcity" in digital media. These were of course the NFTs and that whole fiasco. Even thought this was an imbecilic idea to begin with, they did understand that digital media is infinitely reproducible and thus, by their definition of value, worthless.
My belief on this is tangent to theirs. I think digital media is not worthless because of the lack of scarcity it has, but because of what this lack of scarcity makes me do. I know I can get away with pressing the shutter button thousands of times in a day - after all, my only limiting factor is digital storage space.
My first camera: Kodak Hektar H35
Partly because of this, partly because of father, I decided to try film photography. I wanted something easy to try and get into it, a pocket camera that had absolutely no settings at all. I thought I had to buy something from the last century, but with the recent interest film photography has received, Kodak has come with something that suited my needs to the T: the Hektar H35.
A 35mm half-frame film camera with absolutely no settings at all (if you don't count the flash). I learned not only that 35mm is the most popular film format out there but also what a half-frame camera was. In short, this camera exposes half of the area your normal 35mm camera would expose. So you get double the photos with the tradeoff that they are a bit less than half the size and have a vertical aspect ratio by default. Scared with the price of film, you could say I didn't really see these as tradeoff.
And so I did what any newbie with too much excitement and too little judgement does: I bought the most expensive film I knew about. With a roll of the appraised Kodak Portra 400 in hand, I set out to learn how to load this film into my camera. In hindsight, it is pretty straightforward (and satisfying!). But I thought I had fucked up the first time and decided it was a good idea to unwind the film back into the canister. What I didn't know is that getting it out of the canister is NOT that easy. In awe with my own stupidity, and after my girlfriend talking me out of depressive thoughts, I decided to buy the CHEAPEST film I could find. So I bought the Agfa APX 100.
A couple days after loading this film and taking some pictures in my local area, me and a mate were going to go for some pints in the Battersea area. This area is home to the Battersea Power Station, an absolute unit of a building that was responsible for powering much of London in the past century. A friend of mine even recognised it as the subject of a Pink Floyd album. Destiny did its thing and made sure it was remarkably sunny for an April day, making my ISO 100 film actually useable since I had absolutely no exposure controls. The brutality of that mega-structure felt right seen through black and white.
After receiving the scans it became clear I was in no way a photography connoisseur. I have never, in fact, consumed proper photography art in my life (without counting my father's, which I is and likely will always be my guiding light in this endeavour and so many others).
Nevertheless, I was filled with happiness. Shooting without instant feedback felt incredibly good, mechanically unloading the film with the help of the H35's plastic mechanic felt appropriate, wrapping the film up and posting it to the mail felt grounding and seeing the scans a week later felt... real.
Easy to say I got hooked. Anyway, click below to see the full unedited roll if you wish.
