For those of us who worked daily with film cameras, the arrival of digital photography in the 1990s was a godsend: instant results, an infinite number of shots, omniscient light metering, and, thanks to Adobe Photoshop, forgiveness and the chance of redemption for under- and overexposed images.
But for Quentin Dodd ’94, picking up a film camera was a revelation.
“I was visiting my parents when I found my great-aunt’s Kodak Brownie in a trunk,” Dodd recalls of one of his early discoveries. “I got hooked the minute I saw that vignettey image through the reflex lens. It was like looking back through time.”
The College’s computer network services manager and a published children’s author, Dodd was initially drawn to simple, inexpensive film cameras by a minimalist im-pulse.
“Instead of getting a camera with more features to make photography easier, I won-dered what would happen if you stripped those away to see what you’re left with,” Dodd says. Today, his collection of more than 20 cameras includes classic Yashica 44 and Yashica D twin-lens reflex models, a German-made Exa, various Kodaks, “toy” cameras like the Diana (made in Hong Kong in the 1960s) and the Chinese mass-marketed Holga, as well as a 35 mm Gakken Flex plastic camera he built himself.
But unlike professional photographers still attracted by the artistic effects such cameras produce, Dodd was working with film for the first time. Learning to focus, meter, and control aperture and f-stops manually became part and parcel of his apprenticeship.
“At first, I thought if I didn’t get the exposure exactly right, the film would come back black!”
He was pleasantly surprised. Some early successes, happy accidents, and even his rookie failures enthralled him. He still smiles when displaying the dramatic effects in one image created by the light leaks in his Diana camera.
“And the Holga 55 mm distorts around the edges,” he says, pointing to a photograph of a tractor and barn that appears pulled right out of a 1940s farm scape. “What you see in the viewfinder is only part of the picture, so you frame it to look bad in the viewfinder so that it will look good in the print!”
Working with film changed Dodd’s approach to photography.
“When I go out with my digital camera, I’ll take 200 pictures, and looking through them later on, I look for what went wrong—I don’t like that expression, or composition, or whatever. But when I get film back, I find myself paying attention to the good, rather than the bad. What worked, or what has promise.”
Film has also slowed him down, made him a more deliberate photographer: “When you’ve got 12 shots for the day, you think more about what you’re going to spend those 12 shots on. And with digital, you can take as many shots as you want, so the editing process comes after the fact. With film, for me, I try to do the editing process before the shot.”
He’s able to express his sense of humor in the process, making fun of missed opportunities and focus and lighting errors. And through film, Dodd finds a sense of completing the work he’d never felt with digital.
“At some point with a film camera, a picture is done,” he says. “You have your negative and a print—you can’t Photoshop it, you can’t tune it. You have to be done and move on to the next one. I like that.”
But it’s “looking back through time” that Dodd finds most compelling about his film cameras. He sees the past through the viewfinder, but even more so in the printed images the film and camera produce.
“This is the camera my great-aunt used to take pictures of my mom’s high school graduation, her proms from the early 1960s,” he says as he cradles the vintage Kodak Brownie. “So it was fun to find that camera, clean it up, find film, and be able to take pictures with the same device that she used.”
He points to a photograph he took a couple years ago of the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception in Ferdinand, IN: “It looks like an old postcard. I love the color.”
In one entry on his blog “I’m Not a Camera Guy” he revels, “I took a picture of 1964! My new camera is a time machine!” In another: “I think the pictures from my latest garage sale camera look like they came from a National Geographic magazine, circa 1974.”
He points to a photograph of his children and his parents taken with the Yashica 44 last year in a barn in the place he grew up.
“To me, this looks like National Geo-graphic pictures from the ’70s,” Dodd says. “They used to publish these hardback books about different regions of the country, and I got them from my grandfather. I look at those a lot, and when the pictures I take look like the pictures there, I think, Oh man, I got something. I’m happy with that.
I don’t know why.”