This post also appears on my Tumblr.

I’ve been pretty interested in photography for the last seven or so years now. I started shooting on a Canon Digital Rebel (300D) as a senior in high school, then before long I got a Canon AE-1 Program off eBay to experiment with, since then I’ve picked up a variety of film cameras; Argoflex 75 (my grandma’s TLR c. 1950), FED 5B, Polaroid, Hasselblad, and a few others.

I made the “retrograde” transition to film because I had come across a number of photographers online using film and there was something about the quality of photo that I wanted to emulate, and I was kinda a gear junkie at the time so I figured I should get somewhat similar equipment to try to get somewhat similar results. Another factor in the transition is that I’m a very do-it-yourself guy, I enjoy working with my hands and thus I enjoy the hands-on nature of film. Plus I enjoy doing some things as they were done in the past, somewhat “getting back to the roots,” which developing my own film contributes to nicely.

I digress. The reason I’m writing this is to express my frustration for a select group of people and those people would be the individuals that praise the virtues of film and regard digital as being of little worth anytime the subject of “Which one should I use?” comes up. To always say “oh, film is the way to go” each and every time – especially to beginners of photography – is a bit much, and I think harms the photography community at large.

There are benefits to each type of photography; film and digital definitely have their places.

If someone who was just starting to learn about photography came up to me and asked what kind of camera they should use, I would whole-heartedly recommend a digital camera. A lot can be learned from a simple $250 digital point and shoot these days; all sorts of settings can be adjust to teach the basics of what changes in aperture and ISO do and how to compose properly. Trial and error is the name of the game in learning the basics, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Whereas learning on a film camera can get costly. Say you shoot 25 rolls of film on your new-from-ebay $50 35mm film SLR. That’ll cost you $3 per roll of film (conservative), plus $5 to develop per roll (also conservative), for a grand total of $375 for 2700 shots – in just film and processing costs – just to learn the basics and you don’t even get to see how small changes in aperture/ISO/composition affect the final shot right away. Then you need to scan them to get them in the computer, which means extra cost by way of a film scanner or having the lab do it for you. Don’t think otherwise, film photography is not cheap and is not getting any cheaper.

Disregarding the cost of learning, I don’t see a big draw or need to learn photographic skills using film to begin with when digital makes things so easy and cheap. You could equate it to learning to drive an automatic transmission car before taking on the extra challenge of learning to drive a manual. Get the basics down and then go from there. Once you have the basics down and are ready to enter the varied world of film: have a blast fiddling around cause man, there is a lot of fiddling around to be done.

Some things I commonly hear:

“You can make bigger prints from a 35mm negative, than a digital photo.” For the time being, yes, this is technically true, but the gap is getting narrower every day. And really, how many people are actually printing their photos bigger than A4? A very, very small portion, and for those people film might be the only economical option, but in reality what percentage of photographers is this an issue?

“Grain is better than noise.” Sure, grain is preferable to noise. But that’s why you learn to shoot properly to eliminate noise in the first place.

“Film photography is more credible as art.” Now that’s a slippery slope there. Might as well debate “what is art.”

“Digital photography isn’t real photography.” Yes. Yes it is. Is a movie only a movie if it’s recorded on a traditional film camera? No. With digital photography you’re still taking a light-sensitive surface, exposing it, and making an image. That fills the definition. It’s called progress. You wouldn’t say film photography isn’t real photography because it’s isn’t a daguerrotype.

I see people put film up on a pedestal all the time, and usually it’s the people that start using film to be different. The people that think creating art in a more labor intensive way gives more significance to their art. The people you see on Tumblr (in bunches) and Flickr (in hordes) with their double-exposed, cross-processed, holga shots on deadstock taking themselves way too seriously. Film is just a medium in photography, much like pens and pencils are different media in the drawing world. To claim one isn’t legitimate, hell, to even claim one is more artistically more valid is more than naïve.

To the film purists that claim film to be superior to digital in most regards: get a life.

You can take some great photos with digital, and you can take some pretty shitty photos with film and vice versa. It’s all about knowledge and skill. Don’t limit yourself to one media because you’re doing just that, limiting your options. A few classic sage words: Use the right tool for the job.

I’m going to continue to shoot film because I enjoy the process and all the stuff that goes with it. But I will always have my digital camera(s) for when the moment warrants.

- – - -

Related future rants: Hipsters and film cameras. “Lomo.”

One of the last things I got into in college, that I wish I still had the ability to do now, was bronze casting. It’s one hell of a long process but it’s so very rewarding in the end. To think, these things I made will invariably last forever, unless they’re melted down on purpose that is. That’s just not something you get with graphic design.

Now, unlike a good student, I didn’t document every step of my last project, but I did take a few photos that someone out there might like to see:

The front and back of original clay sculpture. You can see from these photos that there were quite a few undercuts, which initially drew my concern, but I managed to mold it with only a single shim line around the object.

The finished two-piece mold. Hard plastic shell surrounding a soft rubber. This plastic and rubber mold was very easy to create and is very light in comparison to a plaster mold.

Two waxes awaiting surface finishing and spruing. I had to close the “tip” of each heart where the wax was poured in, filled any air bubbles with disclosing wax, fix any imperfections from the molding process, put a few vents and bridges in, and cut out a window in the side to allow the investment to fill the inside of the mold.

Here’s one finished wax with a spru system. This was the only one to have one heart off of one cup. The other six hearts were sprued in pairs, that is, two hearts per cup. It was a pretty simple spru system, with only two sprus off each heart.

These are the hearts I managed to finish before school ended. I have four more hearts that need to be finished; investment removed, ground, welded, and patinated.

Each heart is actually quite heavy, and they size in at about 7″ from tip-to-tip.

You can see this project in my portfolio.

The first half of my senior year here at the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design is done and over. With half the year gone, half of the time I have to work on my IP project is gone as well. Three months of conceptualizing, discussion, and testing over, with just under three months left to finish more conceptualizing, more testing, and all my actual production work.

So, Where Am I At?

The concept I started with some months ago was to do general infographic work using a variety of data sets as the information I was to transform, then make some sort of fine art print of the resulting illustration using a medium such as woodblock, screen print, or what have you. Now, my concept has transformed from visualizing data in general, to visualizing a more specific sort of data, music. More specifically my concept is that I am exploring the connection between music itself, and static and moving visualizations of music. I had originally wanted to not visualize just music because I thought I might be pigeonholing myself into only showing in the end, to my eventual viewers, that I’m only able to visualize one type of data source. I thought it would be a better portfolio project if I showed how I can effectively visualize all sorts of data and show how flexible I am in the work I can do as an potential employee.

At this point I have three illustrations done on the digital side of things, three videos done, one complete set of woodblocks cut, one quarter of the blocks are cut for the second illustration, the silk screens for the third are ready and waiting to be covered in emulsion and exposed. The ideas for the fourth and fifth illustrations and pseudocode for the programs is in my mind ready executed.

What Went Right?

I am super glad I decided to visualize just music. It’s super fun; I like working the programming, I like turning music I like into illustrations, and as much as I like working on the computer, I love doing the hands on, fine art side of things. It’s even been suggested by one of my GSI’s that I could pigeonhole myself more, perhaps by doing something like sticking to one particular musical genre. Honestly, there’s too much music out there that I want to work on to just limit myself to one genre.

What Went Wrong?

Time management, plain and simple. Personally, compared to the rest of my class I’ve been doing pretty well with keeping up with my projected timeline. Sometimes though I’d get stuck on one problem and just spend hours more time on it than I should have and it all adds up, little by little. Combine my programmers-block with the time it takes to cut actual woodblocks by hand, and the time it takes to learn how to work RhinoCAM and all the in’s and out’s of the Roland 4-axis mill and you’ve got yourself quite a large chunk of time, not exactly wasted, but spent on the little things. In my endeavor to learn how to cut my second blocks on the Roland mill I wasted around eight square feet of MDF and something like 12 working hours making mistakes and tweaking the feeds/speeds and bit sizes, but I eventually got it right.

Another thing that went wrong is that I thought a little too grandiose in the beginning of the year with regards to what I’d be able to create in what is actually such a short amount of time. I had originally wanted to create at least eight final prints and two bronze sculptures. It doesn’t sound like to much to me, but in actuality, it is a lot of work.

Endgame

I think in the end I’m going to have five or six final prints, each with a video that will play beneath the print (with headphones to listen to the music) to show the relationship between the music, the moving visual representation of the music, and the static visual representation of the music. There will also be a kiosk that will have videos of each song rendered out using all the different visualizers so the viewer can see how the visualization changes with the various different musical inputs.

I’m very excited to continue with my project this next semester.

As some of you may know, I’m working on music visualization for my senior IP project. And recently I came across this rather unique way of visualizing music. It’s a bit masochistic, but hey, it’s damn interesting at the same time.

You Know I Love You from Alex Jacque on Vimeo.

Something I’m working on, an early version. Made in Processing.

Cameron Adams over at TheManInBlue.com recently posted an article where he asked several prominent typographers to send him a sample of their handwriting. He then puts it up in contrast to some of their work. It’s interesting to see how some of the more famous among the type industry write on a day to day basis.

This article reminds me of the book Inspirability in how the author writes about each designer shown along side a survey filled out by hand from each designer. Some some the designers take the survey pretty serioiusly while others are pretty comical.

Recently I’ve been enjoying this simple typographic screensaver called Word Clock, those with CRT or plasma displays need not apply. It was created by a fellow named Simon Heys. He’s actually got some pretty neat stuff in his portfolio. I suggest you check it out.

Also, why aren’t there more cool screensavers like this?