Light in film photography is everything. It is what makes the image possible, and it is what influences how we will remember the world around us after the shutter has been clicked. While a digital camera can be made to cope with any situation, the photographer using film needs to understand the light in a way that allows them to work with it, because its imprint on the film is immediate and unforgiving. It is for this reason that photographers who master working with light come to love it as much as they do.
One of the primary reasons that I love shooting during the golden hour and blue hour is because of the way that it makes my subjects look. Shooting during the golden hour gives my subjects a beautiful, warm glow. It is easy on the skin and provides a beautiful gradient of color. This is one of the reasons that I love shooting with film. Both Portra and Ektar provide a beautiful, ethereal glow when shot during the golden hour. On the other hand, the blue hour provides beautiful shadows and helps separate the subject from the background. I love the way that the long shadows help bring depth to an image. Film photographers learn to love the golden hour and blue hour because we often have to wait for them. Many times I will go to a location hours early just to watch the light and see how it looks.
Artificial light, too, has its lyrical and expressive possibilities, whether it is the golden tungsten of lamps inside or the harsh, cold fluorescence of the city. The interplay of different light sources, such as window light and a single light bulb, introduces color temperature differences, which give an image a greater emotional depth, with warm, golden skin tones and cool, blue shadows. Since different lighting effects are difficult to adjust in post-production with film, the choice of whether to exploit or mitigate them is a conceptual one, and the resulting photos often have a unique, somewhat nostalgic feel that cannot be approximated with a digital camera.
This relationship with light is deepened by the grain structure of film. I use Tri-X or Ilford Delta 3200 when I know I will be shooting in very low light, the grain these films produce make for an image with a great deal of grit. Likewise I will use films like Kodak Panatomic-X or Fuji Acros when I know I will be shooting in abundant light, these films give me a very fine grain that I can only describe as creamy. The manner in which I know that I will need to work in the future helps me prepare for my eventual print.
When it comes to light, the key to shooting on film is to be willing to wait, whether that means for the cloud to cover the sun, running around the city to catch the last hour of light, or to sit in one spot until the light does all the work for you. Over time, you begin to develop an intuition for the way that light works, and your technical understanding of the situation becomes second nature. This is how film photographs can have such a magical quality to them — as if the light knew exactly how long to stay in one place, just long enough to expose itself onto one unrepeatable negative.
