Aside from my camera-trap work and during workshops, for the last 6 months I haven’t touched digital for any personal work. It was time, I felt, to reassess and for a change in direction, to revisit an old ‘friend’ and commence a project I have had in my mind for some time. Since August I have been shooting, exclusively, film using a Hasselblad medium format camera. This is where it all began, more than 30 years ago where, as an enthusiastic teenager, I would develop and print my own black and white photographs and upon leaving photography college worked both as an assistant to a photographer and as a black and white and colour printer.
I have always loved film but in particular, black and white. It’s difficult to put into words but with monochrome there is a certain aesthetic, a feel that you cannot replicate with digital. Furthermore, I wanted to slow down and not rely on reading histograms, focus stacking, the scatter-gun approach which is all too easy to do and the hours staring at a computer following a day in the field. With film, I carefully consider the scene prior to taking the camera out of the bag, assess the exposure using a hand-held spot-meter, and when I return home, I put the camera bag down and forget about it. I spend time doing other things. Although over that time I’ve shot a couple of rolls of transparency using the ‘blad’, at the moment it’s just not for me. It’s not far enough removed from digital and wouldn’t create the mood I was after in my project: The North Kent Marshes. For more than 30 years I have captured the landscape and wildlife of this region in all seasons. You’d think there wasn’t much left to do and yet there were still places I could see on the Ordinance Survey that I wanted to explore. Through using medium format, shooting B&W, and accepting its limitations I wouldn’t feel compelled to photograph wildlife or distant objects that were well beyond its range. I could only shoot what was reasonably close and in a way that would work with this medium. Instead, I would be content with capturing the moods of the marshes and simply viewing its birdlife through a pair of binoculars.
