Film photography

Of all the hobbies I've ever dabbled in, my interest in photography has been the most enduring. The first time I started to intentionally make images was when I was fifteen, on a family trip to Japan. Hoarding our Sony Cyber-shot compact digital camera for most of the trip, I took mostly terrible photos of just about anything that caught my eye. Most of these photos probably won't ever see the light of day, but that was also when I began to truly appreciate the value of honing an eye for beauty, and using the camera as a creative tool to express my own vision of the world.

Like many others, I continued to pursue photography by indulging myself in the power of the smartphone camera and how easy it is to just point, shoot and process my photos on the same device. It wasn't until I spent a semester abroad working and studying in Beijing that I finally dipped my toes into film photography, hoping to make the kind of images that I'd often try to emulate in my digital photos.

My first (and only) film camera is an Olympus OM-1 that I bought off Taobao and took for its first spin on a trip to Shanghai. Since then, it's accompanied me on a couple more adventures, each time carrying slightly different film stock. In many ways, going analog has made me more intentional as a photographer. Each time I fiddle with the controls on my film camera, I learn a little more about how a scene is turned into an image, with the knowledge that I'll probably surprise myself with the outcome anyway. :-)