Jason Tag Photography

Last week I stumbled upon a site for a group known as The 120 Group. It’s essentially a group of 12 photographers who are working with film. Specifically 120 or medium format film. I am completely intrigued by the idea that in this day and age film is still used. In my professional career as a photographer I have only shot digitally. of course I’d been playing with film really since I was nine or ten years old.

My journey with film starts with me as a child playing with a camera that shot on 110 and then disc film came out and someone bought me a camera and some film. It was purely for snapshots that I was doing this. But film to me always held some kind of magic. I spend an afternoon taking pictures, and then the film would get sent away to a place I couldn’t have known about. And I promptly forgot what I took pictures of. A few days later the pictures would arrive and I would marvel at how cool it was that the places and people of my life were forever immortalized on these small pieces of paper. I though it was pure magic. And how, as a kid, could you not be amazed at this technology!

Later on in my life, I met a wonderful woman who was a photographer and she got me once again to play with film. I dabbled but enjoyed it. It was never going to be a serious thing for me since I had my mind set on being a musician or a sound engineer. So when she left my life, I gave up photography completely.

As I start looking into the idea of shooting on film once again, all of these memories come flooding back overwhelming me. I remember how insecure I was to try and crack open a 35mm film canister. I remember how silly I felt trying to feed the film onto the metal reel for the first time. I had a wonderful guide showing me exactly what to do, but still I held back. The fear of failure or of looking silly stopped me from taking it any further than that. Now is a different story. I feel excited, as well as scared of taking a leap and trying something different.

Today I am buying a medium format camera and all the equipment I will need to shoot and develop my own film. Of course I’m taking the lo-fi approach since I have a rather high end camera and can make my digital shots look like film. So I thought let’s take a different approach to film. The camera I’ve chosen is the Diana+ by lomography. at $49 it’s almost cheap enough to be a disposable 120 film camera. and of course I’m buying film, developing tank, and the chemicals to make it all happen. However I won’t be making my own prints for a couple of reasons. I don’t have the space to build a darkroom in order to make my own prints and secondly what I want to do is to scan my images so that I can post them online and have prints made through Deviant Art or Red Bubble.

So there you have it! Film! In 2010 even! It’ll be fun to see what happens and of course to learn something new… again!