The Beautiful Chaos of film.

Darren Birchall
Nov 16
3 min read

Updated: Nov 17

Way back in the early 1980s I bought my first ever film camera, an Olympus Trip 35(mm) faux-rangefinder, purchased over the course of a year on what British people of a certain age like me still somewhat affectionally call "on the HP". Have a browse on ebay or the many film camera websites these days and you can pick a restored custom model up for around the £130 mark, often with green or orange leatherette, which to be honest I would have probably quite liked back in the days of Bananarama, swatches and stretch jeans. Though I soon outgrew the simplicity of its aperture-priority design, which allowed you to just choose a series of pictures for focus, e.g. of mountains and people, I still have a lot of affection for it as my gateway into the hobby and the occasional good, together with many out of focus and incorrectly exposed images it produced. It was a steep learning curve that was expensive on my meagre twenty six quid a week apprentice' wage.

However now, in a world where my all-singing, all-dancing 40mp digital fuji does almost everything I want it to with it's ridiculous 12800 iso, massive raw files and endless customisable menus, I am finding in my re-entry into film that that very unpredictability is what I missed about it. In waiting for my current film scans or negatives to be returned I find I am getting the same anticipation and excitement I had from collecting that magical packet of prints from Boots all those years ago.

When it comes to the title then, the "Chaos" that it mentions lies there, and I have decided to embrace that and run with it, particularly because of accidents I had recently using my current film cameras. I have two of them (incidentally that are both stunningly gorgeous to look at and should really be in an art gallery in their own right), a 35mm 1952 Voightlander Vitomatic IIa and a medium format, 6x6 Mamiya C3. On a recent holiday to the Lakes I used them both for the first time and shot 3 films of Ilford HP5 400 iso on each. As I was only just getting used to metering, with a phone app for the Mamiya and the on-board selenium light meter in the 35mm Vito, the results were as unpredictable as you could get, compounded by me accidentally light-exposing one of the Mamiya 120 films by taking it out too early when I thought it was fully wound!

But that wasn't all, for thinking that it would be fun to scan my own negs with my fuji on a home made lightbox (it is, but is soooooo fraught to errors, be it focus, room light pollution or incorrect camera settings) the results were even more chaotic. So all that said, rather than hate these cock-ups as I would have done in the 80s, I decided to embrace them, even including the sprockets in my 35mm scans as a sort of signature to their analogue identity.

Therefore in rediscovering film and all it's imperfections, for perhaps the first time I have become properly aware of the physical and chemical process of it all. Grain for example, unlike an electrical anomoly of a CCD or something faked in post, is genuine as a result of a reaction that makes a random arrangement of light-sensitive silver halide crystals in the film's emulsion. Under or Over exposure, and the amount of detail that comes from it, is fixed, with barely a hint of the depths of detail we are able to recover from a digital raw file in Lightroom, save a little dodging or burning to change shades of blacks, greys and whites.

Lastly, there is also a refreshing tangibility to negatives, and as soon as I got my first current batch back one touch of them took me right back to that Olympus Trip and the many years of darkroom shennigans that followed. It was the first step on a very fulfilling journey, and one that I am happily reminded of every time I click one of those mechanical shutter buttons.

That said, I present the chaos of my film efforts. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking and processing them. The first lot are the Vitomatic II 35mm and the second square ones are the light-fogged ones from the Mamiya medium format.