Camera film: not vintage yet

On what camera did you take your first photo? If you’re Gen X or older, it probably was a film camera. Maybe it was even a disposable camera (gasp).These days, we hone our photography skills on digital – a different kind of disposable photography. So why, in this digital age of smartphones and DSLRs, do high school students learn photography on film?Bendigo Senior Secondary College is one high school where the photography department has a bunch of analogue cameras and a fully equipped dark room.”Fundamentally, it’s to learn about light”, says photography teacher Andrea Jones, .”As well as composition, exposure, and attention to detail.”Shooting on film means shooting with purpose. Less happy snapping, more thoughtful framing.”The power of photography is the ability to capture a moment in time that may never be repeated. With the limited frames per roll of film, you compose each frame with intent rather than shooting many frames as digital photography allows.””These restrictions lead to creative compositions in camera. The students can be disappointed when their film does not work. The time to reshoot and develop the negatives again makes us aware of the process that was historically the common medium.”And then there’s the darkroom. Walking into a darkroom feels like entering another world, and another era. Pungent chemicals slurp in trays, lights glow dimly and dripping photos hang like washing on the line.Andrea loves the first time students see a print develop in the darkroom. “The ohhh’s and ahhh’s feels like I have just shown them a magic trick!” She says students have a lot of fun and gain confidence in their skills, and the analogue process develops an attention for detail because they have to be in control of every element of the process. Analogue also offers the opportunity for the ‘happy accident’, where the unplanned is sometimes much better than what you were expecting. Using film offers the chance to experiment with negatives and prints, like double exposure, where a frame of film is exposed twice and two images are superimposed, or solarisation, where photo paper is re-exposed during development.Photography students at Bendigo Senior Secondary College used analogue cameras and experimental darkroom techniques to create a series of photographs on positive aging. They shot older people contributing to the community and living actively – dancing, playing sport, enjoying the great outdoors and the quiet indoors.Their photos in the slideshow above formed an exhibition in collaboration with Seniors Rights Victoria called The Best is Yet to Be. The exhibition title is a quote from a poem by Robert Browning Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.