Why did I start shooting film?
It's a good question and it's going to require a long answer,
which hopefully, could be, helpful to you too.
Welcome to a video slightly different in format this week.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I want to share those thoughts with you.
As introspective as this video will be, I hope it can also serve as a form of inspiration for people who might be experiencing similar sentiments.
To understand my answer to this question ‘Why did I start shooting film?’ we first must look at the question ‘Why I started photography in the first place’
We’re going to look back at how it all began and unpack the journey.
Along the way there have been decisive moments which ultimately led to where I am now.
So, where did it begin?
From a young age I’ve always loved cameras and related technology.
I even used to make home movies of family holidays and I would usually have some sort of camera in my hand.
Fast forward a decade or two and there I am graduating from university with a degree in Documentary Film.
Upon graduating I just wanted to leave the country,
I was 23 years old and I had a travel itch I badly needed scratched.
So, in 2016 I flew out to China.
My discovery that I wanted to be a photographer began the very day I stepped foot in Wuhan.
After a long, arduous taxi journey from the airport,
I climbed out the cab to find ever-extending skyscrapers kissing the clouds,
millions of people going about their business and sights and smells that I’d never experienced before.
I’m often unhappy with my work, consistently wanting to do better.
Looking back at these images, 5 years later, reminds me of how far I have come and how far I have left to go.
This image is quite unspectacular, there’s nothing particularly intriguing about it
it's pretty much just a snapshot,
technically inferior.
Despite this, it’s probably the most significant image I have ever taken.
A simple snapshot of a city, this image serves as a reference point to the beginning of a journey.
It represents the realisation of my desire to become a photographer.
My very own, decisive moment.
Armed with my mobile phone camera & a GoPro, I set about capturing just about anything that interested me.
Soon enough though, in the summer of 2016, I was ready to level up.
Wanting more control over how I shot my images I dusted off my Canon 600D
for a trip to Shanghai.
The extra detail in these shots really gave me a sense of joy and possibility.
Additionally, it opened up the world of photo editing and manipulation.
Decisive moment, number 2.
My first time in Shanghai was also a key building block in finding the style of photography I would come to love.
As we all know photography is an umbrella term for such a vast, varied spectrum,
and part of a photographer’s journey is discovering what type of photograph they want to make.
Captivated by urban spaces I knew then this would form a vital ingredient in my future work.
Towards the end of 2017 I seemed to find a rhythm.
The ball was rolling, the camera was hot to the touch.
By this time I was already regularly posting on Instagram, but I needed more local people to see my work.
I wanted an opportunity. I decided to set up a Weibo account.
I﻿f you don’t know what Weibo is, it’s a Chinese microblogging website.
I started to get the hang of posting photography on Weibo. It has a neat 3x3 grid format for posting pictures, so it’s kinda useful for photographers.
I gained a modest following and this grew slowly over time.
Sometime in October, I got an Instagram message from a mysterious guy calling himself wwenidon.
His images are fantastic. He wants to meet, he wants to shoot.
It was on this night that I made another image that I believe to be of huge significance to my photography journey.
It was decisive moment number 3.
This image garnered significant attention locally in Wuhan. I was contacted by multiple journalists from newspapers and magazines asking for interviews and permission to print some of my work.
A half dozen articles later and I got a message from a private property company asking if I would like to hold an exhibition in one of their establishments.
My first commission.
I spent the next few months developing a concept and with the help of a few assistants prepared the exhibit.
I wanted to explore the relationship between the past and the future as Wuhan is in a constant state of development.
Old China and new China create a fantastic fusion of classic, traditional architecture vs futuristic urban city-scape.
There’s also the deepening generational contrast in Chinese society, so this theme could be explored from multiple perspectives.
It was named ‘Standing on the Edge of Time’ and exhibited from April to June 2018.
This is arguably the most decisive moment to date.
However, there was a steep learning curve with much stress, a lack of confidence and self-questioning.
I felt all these negative things but I pushed through, believed the message in my work and ultimately it was a successful project.
Now that I was gaining some traction my confidence improved and I began to get bolder in shooting style.
I’ve always been seduced by street photography, especially in a candid style. I began to shoot on the streets daily.
Since I heard that quote from the legendary street photographer Bruce Gilden, I have tried to remember it and apply its connotation to my own street work.
Of course, every photograph, and art in general for that matter, is open to interpretation. So those smelly streets might not pungent to everyone’s eyes.
Soon after, another opportunity presented itself, again from the social media site Weibo.
This one was, how can I say, unusual and perhaps a once in a lifetime prospect.
I was asked to meet the SWAT team at Wuhan airport and document a ‘day in the life’ style.
I was granted access to the off-limits to the public part of the airport and even the runway.
When I think back to this now, I'm really grateful for this opportunity because this sort of thing doesn't really happen that often.
My summer plans were cut short due to a medical issue so I returned to the UK unexpectedly.
A period of creative stagnation followed due to my recovery time, so I lost the summer season that year.
As the summer became autumn I was again contacted by an establishment interested in exhibiting some works.
This time it was Wuchang Culture Museum. The commission was simple.
I was to show Wuchang, a large district of Wuhan, from my perspective.
This was quite a broad theme to work with, so I decided to place emphasis on humanity in the city.
The exhibition used street and cityscape photography to showcase the area’s cultural and architectural diversity.
The exhibition proved to be another great learning experience, one that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I will be forever grateful to the very generous people in Wuhan that believed in my work enough to grant me the opportunity to exhibit.
Thank you.
It was a great end to 2018 and a great start to 2019.
After months of hard work, long days and longer nights I decided to take a short break and head to Vietnam for 2 months.
I had already visited Hanoi a few times before and I had friends living there,
So I was pretty familiar with the place.
As we entered Spring 2019 I made a couple of individual pieces but as I should’ve expected, my annual creative block was creeping up on me, right on time.
I found that while living in Wuhan, I would create my best work in the Autumn and Winter months.
This was mainly due to the extremely hot summers the city experiences every year.
I do like the hot weather, I just don’t like working with a 5D Mark iv in Sahara-like temperatures.
In any case I returned to Wales for the summer. Neglecting photography to spend time catching up with friends and family.
On the way back to China we stopped off in Kazakhstan for a month,
as this is Zhibek's home country,
and I took some images which I really do like actually.
But this one, is possibly one of my favourite images that I've ever taken.
There's a number of things that I really like about this picture.
Firstly, the colours.
All the colours in this image seem to compliment something else, and it's really quite freaky how I managed to do this.
If you look at the guy on the bus, he has a black and white striped t-shirt on which closely resembles the road.
We've got two yellow lines on the bus.
We've got the blue of the bus and a guy with a blue t-shirt on.
We've also got the red car and if you look very closely behind the guy on the bus
I think it's a woman sat, behind the window, with a red blouse or t-shirt on.
Also, everyone in this image is anonymous, which adds to the mystery, and
I dunno, it's just, good timing I guess. It's just a well timed image.
So we left Kazakhstan and back in Wuhan I started to practice photography daily again.
I made some images I actually like. Including this one, which I think I want to make a print of soon.
As we approcahed December I started working on my third and final long-form Wuhan project.
I wanted this one to be profound as I was planning on leaving Wuhan in the middle 2020.
As we all know it didn’t work out that way and nobody could have predicted what would happen next.
The mystery virus started here, in the city of Wuhan.
Zhibek and I evacuated to Hong Kong and I made a couple of images there before heading back to the UK after realising that this thing was going global.
As we began to emerge from the profound change that 2020 dealt us I was thinking deeply about the direction of my own work.
Living in China and travelling around Asia for the past 5 years has been a wonderfully enriching life experience.
I was usually floating around some gigantic city and my photography reflected this.
The dense urban sprawl, soaring skyscrapers, millions of people, millions of stories.
Not a sleepy town in sight.
I had a constant supply of subject matter everywhere I'd look. I got used to it.
And then, just like that I was thrown into an environment I wasn’t used to photographing.
It may sound benign, but it’s something I very much struggled with over the past year.
Coming back home was novel at first, like a holiday.
I was seeing family and friends, y'know, for extended periods of time meaning I didn’t do much photography.
I also had so much material from Hong Kong, so I wasn’t too worried about taking any new photographs for a while.
So from January until May / June time, I barely took any new photos and my social media was dominated by pictures of Hong Kong,
slowly becoming what felt to be an out of time and subsequently out of sorts archive.
This is where film photography comes in and begins to steal the show.
If you’ve made it this far or you’re subscribed to the channel you’ll now be aware that I simply love to be in vast cities.
Cities are places that I feel most comfortable in.
They are busy, unforgiving and relentless.
They are full of opportunity, hard-work and well, life.
Cities are the culmination of humanities technological and intellectual evolution.
Cities attract and represent the full spectrum of life, poor or rich, young or old, strong or weak, you’ll find it in a city.
Huge megacities in Asia are something that I’ve grown quite accustomed to.
I have realised that I am very passionate about street, architectural and cityscape photography.
I see cities as a blank canvas, my camera the brush and light my paint.
The bigger the city, the bigger canvas I have to work with.
Having had to evacuate China almost every aspect of my life has been catapulted into a new reality.
A time of true turbulence, the only thing consistent is chaos.
Motivation and inspiration for photography did not escape this fate and I found myself sinking deeper into a hole of creative stagnation.
Then, my possessions from China arrived. I had them shipped back realising the pandemic was going to be long term.
I finally had all my photography equipment back, including my Canon AE-1 program. My first film camera.
It’s not that I don’t like where I’m from. Quite the opposite actually.
In my opinion, Newport is a city, like many in the UK, that has been left behind.
With the high street decimated, industry dismantled and issues like homelessness on the rise, you don’t have to be a genius to see what’s going on here.
Anyway, for one reason or another I just wasn’t taking many photos digitally.
But film? This was something new, something novel, something exciting. It was a challenge.
It’s been such a topsy-turvy year and I just felt I needed to get back to basics.
Revisiting the fundamentals has changed the way I think about photography.
Loading the film, finding a composition, measuring light, using manual focus,
all these things can become secondary when using digital.
I’ve been less focused on the final result and more on the process.
Slowing down this photographic process can benefit enthusiasts and professional photographers alike.
The more I shoot, the more I realise that photography, at least for me, is as much about observation as it is actually taking photographs.
Looking back, just 8 or 9 months ago I knew barely anything about film.
I still know little but I have learnt a lot and I continue to learn every day.
I hope you that you can join me for future adventures, whether they be with analogue or digital, deep and introspective or light and fun. I hope that there will be something for everyone.
I just made a rhyme there didn't I.
At the end of the day, we’re all on a journey. A journey of self-discovery, and, if that journey involves you taking photographs then you might want to subscribe to this channel.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this video is a little different to my other ones so far. It’s was very introspective and deep and basically took place inside my mind.
I actually wrote this in March 2020, well I wrote most of it in March 2020.
And it's taken until now to put it together, in video form.
I understand this type of video runs the risk of being labelled as some kind of ego-driven or self-centered piece, but that is not my intention.
This video has been a way, a process to unpack my mind and understand which direction I'm heading in and where I want to be in the future.
If you made it this far would you be so kind just to drop a comment and let me know whether or not you enjoyed this video?
You might 'yeah this is great, I really enjoyed it and I want to see more',
or you think 'f*ck this, this is absolutely total dog sh'
Your thought or opinions will help me better shape videos for this channel in the future,
so if you could do that I would very much appreciate it, thank you.
Also, usual stuff, don't forget to follow me on all the socials if you want to keep up to date with stuff outside of YouTube,
I do post mostly on Instagram so, head over there if that's your thing.
And that's it, I will see you
I will see you next week, have a good one.