Despite being a very digital photographer and owning some great digital cameras, black and white film inexplicably accounts for many of my favourite photos. It's such an odd situation that I occasionally find myself tempted to prowl the early-morning city streets with my rangefinder and its 35mm lens, which is absolutely not what I'm suited for. No, I like sleeping in, through-the-lens 100% viewfinders, and autofocus. I'm not a practitioner of the prevailing street photography aesthetic and ethos; I just happen to really like some photos taken with monochrome film.
I spent a day at the auto show last weekend, and if there's a Disneyland for colour, that's it. I took over 250 photos with my D800, mostly using my long macro lens, and shot 35 frames of XP2 with my F5 as a lark. Sure enough, my early favourite is from the film camera.
I honestly don't know how much I should be reading into this. Film in general, and monochrome in particular, accounts for an improbably high percentage of my better images, and yet I'm only occasionally motivated to use it. I have to decide if I'm simply picking up my film cameras when I'm already at my best, because film has a tangible cost and therefore isn't something I'll use when I'm uninspired, or if there's something deeper that I should be paying more attention to.
One thing I do know is that I'll never give up digital and colour – if nothing else, long stretches of monochrome images in my lightroom catalog depress me with their unrelenting greyness. It's the photographic equivalent of a long winter. I'm just not cut out for that.
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