As some of you know I’ve been gettign photography in a big way in the last six months or so (those whom I have ‘forced’ to sit for portraits for me would know it even more so). While this was largely sparked by the purchase of a digital SLR (a Canon EOS300D) back in early 2004, I’ve now gone back to film – black and white and high colour slide film (especially Fuji Velvia) in particular. This suits Tegan and I quite well, as she prefers to use our digital camera, and I enjoy using our film cameras themselves a lot more than the 300D.

To further this interest, I have finally taken a course in black and white photography, which really means in darkroom skills, at Photoaccess in Manuka. And it’s great!

Last night I printed my first ever contact sheet, which was a whole lot of fun:

In contrast, Tegan had a day off work yesterday to attend a one day course on post processing photos using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Ironically, these are basically “digital darkroom” skills. Tegan found the course fantastically useful and interesting and also picked up some good tips on how to take better-looking digital photos. At first she was a bit intimidated – she was the only amateur there – all the others were either professional photographers or graphic designers. Still, it sounds as though she held her own and (certainly by the end of the day) knew just as much about post-processing as any of the others.

So between the two of us we now (or will soon) have both old school and new fangled darkroom skills pretty well covered.

Apart from taking photos with our digital camera, I have really got back into film recently – I’ve discovered the joy that is professional quality film and I bought a second hand Canon EOS 30 last year, which is a rather excellent film camera and a decided improvement on my Dad’s old Pentax SP1000 which I had previously used. Using great film like Fuji Velvia or different varieties of black and white film gives better colour and tonality than in digital format, and I can scan them in on my computer to get a digital version afterwards. I have many photos displayed on my account on Flickr taken with film – you can particularly notice the black and white ones and the ones taken with Velvia, which have such wonderful colour.

I took a roll of black and white film into Camera House in Canberra City (Civic), which is right near my work, the other week to have negatives developed. I normally go to another excellent photo shop a bit further down the mall, but it was raining and I didn’t feel like running through the rain.

I should have braved the rain.

The shop called me back an hour later to say they had accidentally put the B&W film through the colour development process, which had the effect of wiping my film – the negatives are almost completely clear. You can imagine how massively upset and angry I was about this. The people at the shop apologised, gave me a new film and offered to process it for free – which is something, but still left me feeling sour.

I got my next B&W roll developed to negatives at my usual place today (it looks great) and I was re-reminded of how disappointed I was about the loss of my previous negatives. I not only lost photos from our holiday to South Australia (taken on the way back between Nerrandra and Canberra) but also more photos than I thought of friends in Sydney. So, Mandy, Byron, Jess, André, Charmaine – I’ve lost my photos of you. Mind sitting for me again next time?