TERRA MAGAZINE
SHOP
PHOTOGRAPHERS
Nick Hadji-Michael
What was your first experience shooting with film? Do you remember the camera/film that was used?
I borrowed my cousins Nikon SLR after I had seen a few photos and wanted to try it out for myself. I put in hp5 and went on a walk around the city. The camera had a broken winder, light leaks and I opened the back door too early. there were probably only a couple of useable photos but that seemed like enough to get me my own camera.
What do you enjoy shooting with currently?
The go-to right now is my Olympus xa. Fits in my palm super durable and gives me rangefinder control.
Name a few photographers you find inspiring and recommend that people should check out.
Cho gi seok https://www.instagram.com/chogiseok/?hl=en
Katie Burnett https://www.instagram.com/katieburnett__/?hl=en
Frank Lebon https://www.instagram.com/frankleboner/?hl=en
What is it that you like about analog photography?
Analog gives the extra step to play around and experiment with a photo. I can cut scratch and burn into negatives creating effects that can’t be seen anywhere else. Because of that Images that I wouldn’t usually bat an eye towards can later turn out to be my favourite pieces. I would just need to find old negative and chop it up into something else. A process that would never happen if I shot digital.
Adam Jamsek
What was your first experience shooting with film? Do you remember the camera/film that was used?
I remember having a thirst for it for so long in my system from working on many film sets when I was starting out and being close to the camera I just wanted express that beauty that it can create in my own image. So the intrigue and the passion was always there despite me picking up my first film camera late. It was three years ago I started, and I used my Canon AE-1 which I still use today. The film I shot with was Kodak Portra. I remember seeing the images for the first time. The texture and colours flirting with the shadows was above with such a vibrancy I hadn’t properly experienced before. Or may it was because it was created from my own expression of observation.
What do you enjoy shooting with currently?
I love shooting with my Canon to this day. I love delving into shadows and capturing the singular streams and rays of light crossing its path. There’s something very intriguing to me and it creates a story in itself, just the way it constructs such patterns with the dark and light toughing each other. And the beautiful thing about that, I can shoot anywhere and the lights and the shadows are always different, composing a new dance, it’s always lovely. Shooting in my house within lockdown has been very stimulating and opening. It is truly a great house to welcoming in intriguing patterns of light and shadows.
Name a few photographers you find inspiring and recommend that people should check out.
Photographers are another form of storytellers and I love such storytellers who can capture the essence of life and movement within life. Moving in its natural stride, departing one area and entering another, existing within that space only for a brief and beautiful moment before moving onto the next. Obviously such a thing can be captured and observed in the form of people and their profiles or if it be nature, maturing from one space of life to the other. For me, the photographers that I look upon for inspiration and connectivity through beauty are: Sebastião Salgado, Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz and Rodger Deakins. He’s a cinematographer which obviously has strong similarities, and as I work in film, his images and quality of telling a story through visual poetry and creating an exquisite and beautiful vastness has always been a big influence and inspiration for me.
What is it that you like about analog photography?
Today, moments come by and pass very quickly, and before we can really accept and acknowledge their presence, they have already left us, passed on into the next real like the wind passing us by. And the only attempt to capture that is pulling out a phone, not giving an observational detail or respect to its existence and press a button. Where is the magic within that. Call me old school, but we need that magic to allow us to really see thing for what they are. Analog does this for me. Even when I shoot with it on my films. It creates a discipline within you, to respect the moment, allowing you to respect yourself, as a storyteller, as an artist and as an observer about to take a photo. For me, shooting on film is like a meditation, it creates patience within you and make you observe and explore the situation before capturing it. You can’t just simply press a button and post it and call yourself a photographer. That almost strips away the art form of the process and that’s rather sad to me.
When you discover a moment with film, it gives you the patience and respected control to take your time, adjust what you need to and to also choose what angle you want to capture this. Because in the end, if you are taking photos, you are a storyteller and a storyteller is aloud that freedom to choose how to capture such an event and allow its message to shine brighter than it initially was.
For me it connects me to the moment, if only for the briefest of time, but I’m there and I have relationship with whatever it is I am taking, and because I can’t instantly witness it, I have to respect it and allow it to flirt with my imagination. You have opened yourself up briefly to the subject and the subject has opened up to you, then the moment is gone, only from the physical, but not the magic of the film itself. It continues to grow and manifest into something special until being developed. For me this is love of a craft I’ve had since a kid. And I don’t get that with anything else, no iPhone, no digital or anything, only the beauty of film and that’s why I will shoot with it for as long as I can, in photographs and my films.
