WASTING ROLLS ON PURPOSE — Marquee | Film & Video Production

My memory is awful. Ask anyone who knows me. My sister plays this truly terrible game with me every Thanksgiving where she lines up our extended cousins (who we see at least once a year) to try and see if I can remember any of their names. I fail spectacularly, to everyone’s delight, every single time.

While I can make light of it, honestly it’s been a major struggle for me for the entirety of my adult life. Maybe most of my adolescence too. Chalk it up to years of untreated depression that tricked my brain into thinking that nothing was ever going to be worth remembering. By 25 I had resigned myself into living the life of a person with the long-term memory of a mayfly, but then my sister gave me my mother’s Minolta sRt 100.

Ironically, I never spent much time thinking about cameras or photography as a kid. I was absolutely obsessed with movies, though. I loved acting and knew I wanted to work professionally, in whatever capacity, in the film world. But, it never crossed my mind to understand the workings of a camera in order to make those movies. What was there to learn, right? If my phone can have every automatic setting already working, without me doing anything, how hard could it be?

I never took a class in high school. I never touched a camera. Even when my sister got me my first job at a local photo processing lab (the same lab where I drop my film for processing now) I never took an active interest in learning anything about the technical rules of cameras or photography from my coworkers. I didn’t even understand why people still needed film developed in the 21st century when we had DSLR’s and iPhones.

I was an arrogant little shit. But, I’d learn.

SELF-DEVELOPING

Okay, some context here, I work in narrative and commercial film production as a 2nd Assistant Camera Operator. Essentially I'm the guy who claps the rainbow colored sticks before every take. On the side I run a small production house with my two best friends making mostly short films and music videos together. But at 25, I’d essentially never taken an intentionally framed photo before in my life...much less an entire roll of 35mm film.

So, after wrapping my first short film with my sister on crew, she pretty much told me that I’m never going to fully understand framing or the craft of film in general until I started shooting stills. She said that I ‘needed to experience the feeling of knowing that you shot a fantastic roll, only to get it back from the lab a week later to find that they’re all awful’.

And hey, holy shit, she was super right.

*(L-R) Behind the Scenes of the author’s short film. Shot on Kodak 400 UltraMax 400 by Marquee Co-Founder Will Hartsock. Louisville, KY. March 2021.*

Digital cameras have surrounded me for my entire life. The internet and I have, quite literally, grown up together. The first modern webpage is only a year older than I am. By the time I was a teenager, we all had cameras in our pockets and an Instagram handle. The photograph as we had known it for over a century lost its value in the blink of an eye. Photos ceased to be tangible things, moments frozen in time that you could tuck away in a shoebox under the bed or tape to the inside of a locker door. Now, they’re thousands of little ethereal files in a grid on your phone. This seemingly infinite timeline of moments from your life that after capturing, and let’s all be honest with ourselves here, we never fucking look at again. And even worse, photography has become almost weaponized for the sake of self-esteem. A picture used to be worth a thousand words but has evolved into something worth a thousand clicks that convert to a thousand dollars while rarely capturing any real moments.

FLASH FORWARD

Alright, let’s get back to early 2021. Coming in hot off the undisputed best year ever for collectively everyone in the entirety of human history, things were still kinda weird and isolated. Nobody could leave their houses or gather in large groups and were told to stay 6 feet from one another. We couldn't see the majority of our loved ones' faces anymore. One upside? Everyone decided to invest their stay-at-home time in fuckin’ HOBBIES:

BREADMAKING.
SOMETHING CALLED REIKI.
CASUAL CARPENTRY.
EVERYBODY IS ROLLERSKATING NOW.
CHESS????

Any moderately entertaining activity that has existed within the last century was revived with full force in 2020. And praise be to the Minolta Gods & St. Zeiss The All-Seeing, so was film photography.

The sRt 100 that my sister gave me was in perfect condition. It’s the closest thing to an heirloom that my mom has for us. She bought it in Japan in 1982 before passing it down to my sister when she was around 10 years old.

(Outer) The author’s mother with her Minolta sRt 100 and her mother in Japan, 1982 (Center) The original Minolta sRt 100 with its “sister camera,” purchased for the author’s sister for her birthday.

The second I got my hands on it, I was instantly obsessed. The bulky metal build, that heavy flick of the mirror smacking the bottom of the prism, that satisfaction of pulling your lens into that perfect crispy focus. The fact that this thing could operate entirely without a need for a battery absolutely fascinated me. You can shoot with this thing in any condition without ever having to worry. That kind of self-contained engineering blew my mind, you guys. From the day that Minolta was put in my hands, I haven't left a house without a camera. It’s changed my life.

It started with a simple reason to get out of bed. I couldn’t just take pictures of my dogs forever, so I decided to drive across town to get coffee every day with my camera. It forced me to wander the city I grew up in, and to look at the most familiar place I’ve ever known differently. Now I see it with intention, an appreciation for every angle of the things around me. In a weird way, film photography made me realize how much of my life that I've always taken for granted. Film is expensive. You spend an average of $10 for only 24 or 36 frames. It forces you to be more tuned in to what is worth remembering. Should I take another shot of that car, maybe push a stop for safety? Or do I think I got it the first time? I have 6 frames left, how ~mood~ is that gas station, really? When you have an infinite amount of chances to capture your moment, you become numb to the point of why you want to save that moment in the first place.

Look around, we live in the fucking future. I don’t need to get into all the examples, just by virtue of time and the never-ending trudge of human progress, we have a certain level of unspoken quality standards that everyone has been conditioned to strive to meet. If you need an example, how many filters are on your Instagram right now that were created for the sole purpose of making you look like a warped supermodel from The Fifth Element?

We want everything to look perfect. 4K, hi-res, bleeding edge. This rabid addiction to perfectionism in our own personally created media has produced what feels like a conveyor belt of the exact same life projection for the last decade. Please don’t ask me about TikTok. I will sound like an old man screaming at the sky. Your timeline is boring. Your show footage is boring. Your high contrasted still studio photos are fucking boring. Not because they’re bad, or poorly made. Quite the opposite. It’s because they’re too good. Like every craft that’s been around for over a century, humans have collectively figured out what makes a photo “good”. It’s literally down to a science, with rules and grids, and ratios that all scientifically agree with what our stupid eyes think is “good”. There’s not much really left to learn, in terms of technical understanding. So once you understand those “rules”, you’re now considered “good”.

Film photography feels to me like a return to form to the rough and imperfect beauty that made me fall in love with cinema, and by proxy the arts, when I was younger. Some of your favorite film moments were probably either improvised or by accident. And, because of that, you get to see a little glimpse of humanity through the precisely curated reality that you’re caught up in. When everything around you is made with near-perfect precision, what else is there but to try and rediscover the reality that lies in the imperfect? That’s the beauty of film photography to me. I have complete control of the image, from seeing it in the world, to how it looks after developing and scanning them (that is, if I ever get around to learning that bit). The more fucked up the better.

‘I love taking bad pictures. A friend of mine once told me that there’s no such thing as a wasted roll, and he was right. Not just because you learn more and more with every roll, but the simple fact that you took a moment in front of you, from your short life on this earth, and burned it with light from our sun, onto this little physical strip to be saved forever is nothing short of miraculous.’

No matter how it turns out, that’s a moment frozen from your life that you get to keep with you. It’s something small that shows the world what your life looked like even after you’re gone. It’s moments you can physically hold. The only thing we really truly have in this life is time, and the closest thing to keeping that time with you is a photograph in your hand. No amount of terabytes of photos stored in a harddrive could ever equal a small stack of pictures in your closet. The time it takes for you to see the pictures you’ve taken makes each one of them feel so much more important, and causes you to be more aware of your surroundings at all times. With a film camera in your hands, every moment must be considered. With a finite number of shots, you have to make each one of them count.

*(L-R) Selects from the author’s first paid film gig photographing* *The Ophelias. Cincinnati, OH. July 2021*

There’s something about having an old bulky camera hanging around your neck. It gets in the way a litte. Like it’s always reminding you it’s here. I think that’s why I bring one with me everywhere. It reminds me that I’m living a life that’s worth remembering. It’s a representation of my commitment to life. Once you bring a film camera with you everywhere, you always have a reminder that the moment you are living is worth remembering.That moment always is, for better or worse, still part of your life which is what matters. Take it from a guy with the memory of a mayfly. When you look back, you’re going to want to remember these days. So with every light leak, or softly focused subject, or underexposed picture that I get back from the lab, I am happy. Because those are still my memories that I know I’ll keep forever.