5 frames with a Canon EOS 30 – A return to film

I’ve been around photography my whole life, starting with film in the 90s as I ambled around after my dad. Since we were often out looking at wildlife, as my parents are ardent environmentalists, this usually involved me shoving a macro lens into the personal space of the local insects and getting a whole roll of out-of-focus photos of where the bug du jour had been sat five seconds before.

Changing interests during my teens and the move to digital ended with photography taking a back-seat for a while, but I’ve always had a camera with me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what doesn’t stick for me with digital photography, but the process has never really engaged me. The results from my R6 are excellent, but once the AI autofocus locks on and the auto exposures do their job, image stabilisation whirring away, I sometimes feel like my main job is to press the button and that, at some point soon, it’ll figure that out for itself too. Sometimes the process is as important as the results, sometimes the it can even inform the results, and process is something that I find film excels at. There’s a rhythm to film photography that digital is sorely missing; loading and unloading the film, the sounds of the clockwork in a mechanical shutter, and the little sense of closure on an image when winding on factors heavily into my enjoyment. Seeing my settings laid out as physical dials also seems to fit much more neatly into my head than looking at another screen, when I have enough of those already.

So we come to a year ago, where my dad has dug out my Canon EOS 30 from the attic. The “soft-touch” coating on the grip has done what it does best, and returned to the primordial ooze from whence it came. Fearing that the sudden glut of crude oil tackily working its way off the camera and onto every surface in our office will encourage the hungry eyes of a military complex to deliver democracy and occupy the back garden, I wiped it all over with some isopropyl alcohol.

With the camera now in lovely, useable condition and the thrum of the helicopters receding into the distance, I loaded some Ilford Delta 400 and set off with a friend on a walk around Llansteffan, in South Wales, to shoot my first roll of film in what must have been close to two decades.

It was a pleasant April day and the ramsons were out in full force in the woods around the castle. The route we took goes up past Llansteffan castle, through some old woodland, and out into more open countryside surrounded by fields. We went up to the castle itself to look out over Carmarthen bay towards St Ishmael and were lucky enough to have gone on a day with some sea mist rolling in, which I think plays well to the strengths of B&W film. The rest of the route is an easy but enjoyable walk past fields and hedges until it loops back on itself and joins the West Wales Coastal Path and Llansteffan beach.

The photos came out quite nicely, the EOS 30 making a very approachable bridge between my digital camera and the well-rusted memories of how to use film.

Until this point I’d always shot in colour (in both film and digitally), and colour has always been very important to what drew my attention, so this roll was also an exercise in finding compositions that are interesting regardless of medium, and places where values and contrast were stronger. I think, overall, I succeeded.

As much as I know I could arbitrarily limit myself to shooting only a few photos digitally, the hard limit imposed by the film also helped immensely with overriding the many years of wanton smartphone snapping that had preceded this outing.

The whole experience completely reignited photography for me. The ever increasing boxes of film in the freezer and growing selection of cameras on my desk can attest to that much. I’ve found that my partner’s disapproval of the purchases grows non-linearly with each new camera, but have yet to establish trend. I’m currently on eBay looking for more research material.

If you’d like to see more of my dabbling with film, or the results of my complete disregard for the privacy of insects, I can be found on Mastodon, Flickr, Instagram or my website.

Thanks for reading.

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