Analog photography

The naked truth

I must have been 12 years old when I bought my first camera. Washing cars earned me enough money to buy a Nikon EM with a 50mm f1.8 lens. Film was expensive back then, so I didn’t shoot any casual snapshots. Every shot was carefully framed, light was accurately measured, and focus was adjusted with care.

Every click was magic.

Photography, then, was a conscious process. It took time, some technical skill, and, most of all, patience. Often, weeks passed between the actual shot and seeing the result on paper or slide.

From grain to pixels

Entering the new millennium, digital photography started to happen. When Nikon released its first affordable DSLR (the D70), I bought it. With a 28-200mm zoom, it did everything I wanted and more. It went with me everywhere I went. Gone were the days of the expensive film! Every week, I took hundreds of pictures. I didn’t have to wait days or weeks to see the results. The screen on the back of the camera showed it right away. It didn’t need much light either: at 1600 ASA the pictures were still decent enough.

Digital photography made experimenting easy! Since I didn’t have to worry about wasting costly film and photo paper, my photos became better.

Painting with pixels

Soon RAW files became mainstream. Adjusting exposure, contrast, and white balance after the shoot became child’s play. You could use Photoshop with its endless editing possibilities. Soften the skin of your portraits: check. Colour grading: no problem. Blurring or removing objects for ‘purity’ or ‘clarity’ became common. Once, photography meant painting with light. You did so when you captured the light on your celluloid.

Now, we were painting with pixels after the shot on our big-screen computers. I recall a photojournalist who lost his job back then. He had used the clone-stamp tool in Photoshop to add smoke to his picture. And I remember wondering: where is the line between editing a photo and adding to it? The lines between truth and fiction became blurrier than most people realised.

So many photos, so little time

One Saturday afternoon, I found myself staring at my picture folder on my hard drive. It contained thousands of RAW files that I hadn’t even looked at yet. It had become too much.

I would have to decide which pictures to keep. Then I would have to adjust exposure, contrast, and lighting options in bulk in Lightroom. Afterwards, I would edit the best of those pictures in Photoshop. Finally, upload the best of the best on Flickr. (Instagram didn’t exist yet, and back then, that was where the cool pixel kids hung out).

That Saturday, it dawned on me. Taking the pictures had become easier than ever. Yet, I spent more time than ever before on it. I had replaced the conscious act of taking pictures with random clicking. And I had postponed the thinking to the post-processing.

And that had taken the pleasure out of photography for me.

Back to basics

It was in Milan, Italy, that I saw a Leica M6 in a shop window. It looked so simple, so mechanical, so pure. It was affordable-ish. A couple of weeks and tons of research later, I bought a used M7 with a new lens. An incredible Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f1.5 with the most beautiful bokeh known to man.

I loaded an Ilford HP5 and took my first pictures.

The clicks gave me the same thrill as they did when I was twelve. When I wait for my shoot results at my favorite photo lab, I feel just as nervous, too.

I haven’t stopped making photos since. And I’m loving every minute of it. Click after click.