Thirty-six frames, one week, no screen on the back. Fifty-two rolls over a year, which is about eighteen hundred photographs, which is roughly what my phone takes in a bad month.
The constraint does the work
With thirty-six frames and no way to check, you stop taking photographs of things and start taking photographs of moments you have decided about. The decision is the whole difference. I would stand somewhere for a minute working out whether it was worth a frame, and about half the time it was not, and that minute of looking was better than the photograph would have been.
The best thing film gave me was not the photographs. It was a reason to stand still in the street and look at something for a full minute.
What came back
- 1,872 frames shot, of which I scanned 1,601 (one roll was fogged, two rolls I loaded badly)
- Keepers: 94, by my own count, which is about one in twenty
- Printed and on a wall: six
One in twenty sounds brutal until you work out your phone's ratio honestly.
Was it worth it
About £900 in film and developing, which is the part nobody puts in these posts. For me, yes — not because the images are better, but because the practice of looking changed, and that has stayed with me on the weeks I shoot nothing at all.
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