Film is, unfortunately, unsuitable for vegetarians. For the last couple of years, I have been trying to find vegetarian/vegan alternatives to roll film and there is, sadly, nothing (unless you count alternative processing, which I don’t!). When I spoke to Fuji, they informed me that they had tried using pectin instead of gelatin, but the switch in manufacturing processes for something that was now considered to be niche was just not viable for them. It was cool that they had tried, though.

I had given up on my moral compass ever permitting me to use film until my dad gave me his old AE-1. This is a camera I lusted after as a kid. He kept it in this big, leather briefcase and he had lenses and cloths and an air puffer thing I could use to annoy the cat. I wanted that camera. When he said that I could have it, something inside me just changed. It’s hard for me to rationalise because, plainly, this is hypocrisy. I’m not going to try to sugar coat it or present an argument that gelatin is a by-product and not using it would be a waste or any of the other things people have used to try and help me come to terms with using film. The fact is, film contains gelatin. I wouldn’t eat a food that contained it but I would, apparently, use a product that did. Hypocrisy.

It’s awkward, I don’t like it and I think about it every time I release the shutter on a film camera, but there it is. My passion for taking pictures appears to outweigh my passion for animals (looking at Sudo, it’s like he knows and he’ll never forgive me).

With the crappy hypocrisy out of the way (although, not really), I do hope I can make something relatively worthwhile with film. It presents a totally different way of approaching creating an image. Digital processes are almost entirely a crutch that can actually get in the way of creating a photograph. You don’t compose properly because you could fix in Lightroom (OK, I cropped and straightened one of these, but it was totally necessary). You don’t expose properly because RAWs are pretty amazing a lot of the time and you can fix almost anything in Lightroom.

Film takes all that away from you, and it’s terrifying and liberating. Because you can’t get an instant preview (and a single exposure of 35mm roll film ends up costing about 50p; medium format is over £1), correctly framing and exposing an image is an investment both financially and mentally (oww, I thought that was going to come out is quite horrible!).

There’s also an element of serendipity to film. It might take the conservative individual a week, two weeks, a month to finish a roll (especially if they have a few cameras), so by the time you see the results, there’s no way they remember everything that’s on that roll. It can be quite magical to flick through your prints (or, let’s be honest, the scans you imported into Lightroom) and come across something you completely forgot existed.

So, with the above in mind, I embark on a new journey into film. It’s not ideal, but I’m going to try to use that negativity to push me to create better, more meaningful things emphasis on try.

This is the introductory post to a set called f1lm: the first two rolls of film I received from a fifteen year break shooting film. If you’re reading out of context, please consider looking at those images as well. You’ve got this far, so I’m going to presume you’re interested in that!