More content that I haven't migrated yet is available on the previous version of this website.

Well, it happened: I got sick enough of my website to redesign and rebuild it. All of that is fun, but migrating the content is a slog, so it'll happen slowly. In an attempt to motivate myself, I decided to deploy this new version with as much content as I had. More to come, hopefully.

Photography has become my creative practice and obsession over the last year and a half. It’s been a year since I started shooting film. I shot my first roll some time in November, and started developing at home in December 2017. I’m scanning my 250th roll today. I sold my digital camera a few months ago when I realized that I had only used it three times in 2018. Basically, I’m all in on film. I don’t think it’s “better” than digital (and I find that conversation tedious), but it works for me.

There are several reasons why I enjoy film, some of them practical, some philosophical. I’m not dogmatic about it: it’s not for everyone or for every purpose. Were I shooting professionally, I’d certainly use digital cameras too. Given that photography is a purely personal creative practice — freeing after having to play shitty gigs for years in order to make money from music — film suits me.

Part of the reason I decided to try film was peer pressure, if I’m honest. I’m almost exclusively interested in street photography (by which I mainly mean candid photos of people being themselves in public spaces) and there’s a long tradition of film shooters within that style. Many of the contemporary photographers I enjoy shoot film too, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Of course it doesn’t really matter — there are plenty of amazing photographs being made using digital cameras — but there is something nice about looking at Winograd’s or Richard Sandler’s or Koudelka’s work and knowing that I’m using the same process they were. 

Then there are aesthetics. I’m interested in black and white photography1 and to my eyes black and white film just looks better than digital RAW files converted to black and white. This alone wouldn’t be enough to make me shoot film, but it’s definitely a factor when combined with everything else. More significantly, film requires me to spend less time on the computer. For me, a scanned negative requires a lot less processing and decision making than a RAW file. Processing a RAW file into a beautiful image is an art in and of itself, but not one that I’m particularly interested in. A RAW file is a canvas that can acquire character through processing, whereas film starts with character (which can be shaped by how you develop it). I spend so much of my time looking at screens — at work and otherwise — and I like hobbies that don’t require more of that.2

I love the process of film photography: being limited to ~36 shots before I have to change the roll, having to wait to develop the film before I can finally see the images,  and having binders full of my negatives on the bookshelf. When shooting digital, I can’t resist the immediacy: without fail, I’d plug in my SD card as soon as I got home in the evening to look at the day’s work. Shooting photos on the street can be very exciting. You never know whether you managed to capture the moment before it passed, and taking candid photos of strangers without their consent is thrilling. The excitement  (along with caffeine and good music) can help me get the shot, but it doesn’t help me evaluate it objectively later, to see the photo for what it is rather than how it felt to take it. Film forces a delay between taking the shot and looking at it for the first time, which helps. Even if I developed a roll on the same day that I shot it, I would have to wait until the next day for it to dry before I scan it. In reality, I always have a backlog of film to develop and a few weeks pass before I see my results. 

I’ve developed all of my black and white film at home since December 2017. The process itself is easy, and kind of fun. I don’t love doing it, but I like that I have to put in some work to actually see my images. And again, it’s an analog, physical process that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer, which is a plus. Developing film is its own skill that can have a big impact on how your photos look, which has been fun to learn. I’ve mostly kept it simple: I shot 100 rolls of Kodak Tri-X and 100 rolls of Ilford HP-5 using the same developer (HC-110) in order to nail down my process and decide which film I prefer (HP-5). After getting consistent results with that, I’ve started to experiment with other chemicals and recipes.

On a philosophical level (which is secondary to the practical, but fun to think about), there is something appealing about the tangibility of film. When I press the button on my camera, I let light imprint on a physical object, which I then convert myself into binders full of negatives. Assuming that I processed them properly, my film should outlive me without significant degradation of quality. It’s a fully mechanical process — my camera works without a battery — and that’s pretty cool. 

Finally, shooting manually has been a great learning experience, teaching me a lot about light, exposure, and leaving me in control of my images. This isn’t strictly related to shooting film because it’s possible to shoot using manual exposure and focus on all digital cameras, but most of them (except for Leicas) don’t do it well for my purposes. I’m the kind of person that always has to be practicing something, and learning the mechanics of manual photography (learning to judge light by eye, and judge distance to focus by feel) has been very rewarding. I’m a technical/analytical person as much as I am a creative person. Photography is a perfect mixture of technical and creative for me: you get the mechanics out of the way so that you can just respond  automatically when the shot comes.3 You take a second to celebrate if you think you got it, or curse if you think you didn’t, and keep walking.

In High School, I fell in love with Jazz and found my voice in a big awkward instrument that I affectionately refer to as the six foot violin. Fortunate to have good teachers and an obsessive temperament, I picked it up pretty quickly and was playing around Atlanta professionally by my last year of High School.

I hadn’t thought about becoming a professional musician until High School, but in 2007 I put my identity as a computer geek on hold and  went to Florida State University to study music. In Tallahassee, I found  a community of peers with the same unsatiable drive that I had for Jazz music. In 2011 I moved back to Atlanta with a music degree and two equally impractical minors (philosophy and religion) that I thoroughly enjoyed getting.

In Atlanta, I played music and worked part time for a sex cushion manufacturer where I dealt with giant spreadsheets and with Amazon. I was lucky to  develop close musical relationships with a group of creative like-minded musicians in Atlanta, but it got stale.

I began to wonder what being a Jazz musician means in the twenty  first century. If it means playing the same $100 background music gigs  for the of my life, then maybe it’s not for me. I knew there was more to  it, but I didn’t think I could get to it in Atlanta.

In December of 2013, sufficiently fed up with my routine in Atlanta, I  took a risk. I bought a one way ticket to New York City. I brought a  suitcase and $7000 in savings, and set out to find a job and a place to live.

Knowing that I’d need a good job to survive in New York, I spent the year leading up to the move reconnecting with my computer geek side and  deliberately building up my skills. I fell in love with the web. It had changed a lot since I bought my first HTML book at age ten,  and I wanted to be a part of it. I learned about responsive design, fell in love with typography on the web, had some fun with Rails, and  became pretty good at CSS in the process.

In February 2014, I took a job as a Front End Developer for Something Digital, an agency in midtown Manhattan. I get to work all kinds of projects with some great people, and I learn a lot.

Nadav Spiegelman

Writing