You know, I don’t think I could actually tell you when it began. Was it in France? It might have been. There was that festival in Brittany, in the summer of 2009, and I do remember us buying some flimsy disposable cameras for the occasion. That’s when the seed was first planted into my head, I reckon.
Without really meaning to, I guess I just started carrying a disposable around after that. I didn’t put much thought into it; it just happened. Smartphones with a decent camera weren’t really a thing back then, and I did like the idea of chronicling my life. I also lost everything all the time as a teenager, and felt I couldn’t be trusted with a digital camera. That’s probably how it started.
In any case, something clicked in 2011, in a semi-abandoned house. I’d taken a snap of a deep green, velvet armchair, and the two chandeliers that, for some reason, hung just above it. Looking at it now is quite amusingly humbling as, it turns out, it just wasn’t that brilliant a picture. The composition is alright but the colours are a bit drab, and I maybe could have crouched instead of taking it head on.
That doesn’t really matter, though. What does is that I got my prints back and fell in love with it. Until that point, I’d not put much thought into what I’d been taking pictures of. The chair changed everything. At Christmas that year, I asked my parents to buy me a vintage little point-and-shoot, which I hoped would do a marginally better job than the disposables I’d been using. It did.
As time went on, I started getting better and better at taking pictures too. I tried to pay more attention to light and angles; perspective and colours. I never learnt about it formally, however. That was always my deal with myself: I loved the idea of having a hobby that was just that. I didn’t want to take a course, or look at online tutorials. It was something I was doing for fun.
A few years later, in 2014, I started a small photography blog, where I could put my best snaps. I didn’t even send the link to anyone else at first: it was a project run by me, for me. Some people write diaries, and I had this website where I could scroll back through pictures and think about the places I’d been to, and the things I’d witnessed.
I can still do it now. Last month I was in Paris and Vienna and this month I got my pictures back and I uploaded them to my blog. This time last year, I was busy going through the shots I’d taken in New York, and choosing the ones which I felt deserved to go up online. For over a decade now, I’ve been taking snaps of my adventures, both at home and abroad, and adding them to my collection. It has become, by some distance, my longest-running hobby.
It also gives me so much more than photographs. Having all these mementos is lovely, of course, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Instead, the reason why I love carrying a film camera around so much is that it has fundamentally changed my relationship with the outside world.
If I have it in my bag, I will automatically become that much more aware of my surroundings. Without realising I’m doing it, I’ll start keeping an eye on the way the light is hitting that building; the wind blowing on these flowers; the old confetti strewn across the pavement. Not all of these vignettes will become pictures, and not all of those pictures will be worth keeping. Sometimes the sun won’t cooperate, my hand will get a bit shaky, or the scene I thought was charming won’t quite look the same once flattened.
Crucially – none of that matters. What does is that I get to walk around endlessly seeking small pockets of beauty in everyday life. It’s easier to do in foreign cities, as your eyes will always be drawn to novelty, but trying to keep London fresh and exciting is a brilliant challenge in itself. It feels a bit like being in a very, very long-term relationship and attempting to remember just why you’d got obsessed with your partner in the first place.
Sometimes you will be able to capture one of those details that still drive you wild; sometimes you won’t. That’s the fun of it. Tech giants want our lives to become smoother and more efficient than ever, and amateur film photography represents, to me, the exact opposite of what they preach. It’s an inexact science largely based on coincidence and luck. It requires blind faith, and forces you to really put everything you have into one or two shots, as opposed to acting like a paparazzo in a frenzy.
It then asks you to wait for days or weeks to see the results of all that work. It’s a complete waste of time! And I wouldn’t change it for the world.
