Film photography around Oxford

• Introduction
• Photos
  • Up St. Aldates
  • Along the High Street
  • The hall
  • Library out the window
  • The cloisters
  • The view from the Thom building
  • Past the Radcliffe camera
  • Oops, flashing the film
• Conclusion

Introduction

After spending 3+ hours a day on my phone in 2023, I decided to get rid of my iPhone 11 and went back to using my old Honor 9 Lite from 2017. The idea was that I’d spend less time on a device which was worse in every single way.

One of the problems with doing this though was that it meant I didn’t have access to a decent camera with me at all times. So I went full hippie and bought a Pentax P30T from 1990. This would probably be my profile picture if I really went for the whole analogue-trust-me-its-only-two-pounds-a-photo aesthetic:

(shot on AgfaPhoto APX 400)

I can’t really pinpoint my specific motivations for doing this. I’m not very good at photography (as will shortly be demonstrated). Maybe it has something to do with the 10,000+ Instagram Reels I saw of cool film photos before I switched to my old phone.

One of the reasons I did this was to get better photos than my old Android phone could take, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 30 years in the future there’s a 19 year old somewhere ditching his WALL-E space-laser-photo-phone-machine for the nostalgic aesthetic that only a entry-level 2017 Android phone could get you (and maybe this is already happening with people wanting a camcorder look).

Photos

This is a small selection of the resulting photos from the following two terms at university. I’ve done no colour correction on them but have cropped a couple so that I could straighten them out. Everything here is was either shot on Kodak Ektar 100 or on Cinestill 800T.

Up St. Aldates

This was looking up St. Aldates, past Tom Tower and George & Danver, and was shot on Ektar 100.

Along the High Street

It started chucking it down about 5 minutes later after this photo was taken but at least the pre-rain clouds made the sky a nice colour. This was shot on Cinestill 800T, if you look far enough into the distance you might be able to spot its characteristic “halations”, where the light bounces around inside the film a little and causes a red glow. These will be much clearer in a couple of the later photographs.

The hall

This is the side of the dining hall at Christ Church, taken from just by the entrance to the meadow. This was also shot on Ektar 100.

Library out the window

This is the (blurry) view of the library from where my room was. Another shot on Ektar 100.

The cloisters

Quite a blurry one of the cloisters in Christ Church, shot on Ektar 100. One thing I found hard about film photography was getting the manual focus right, especially since I am slightly short-sighted.

The view from the Thom building

Here’s two pictures of the same thing, one on film and one digital. Can you guess which is which?

If you guessed that the first one was digital and the second one was film, you’d be right! This wasn’t a very hard quiz. Obviously it’s difficult to compare the two exactly since the weather is different, but I still prefer the film one. This was on Cinestill 800T, and you can spot the halations again on the very shiny side of a wall at the bottom of the leftmost crane.

Past the Radcliffe camera

Thought the last quiz was easy? Get ready for this one: which is film and which is digital?

Okay, that one was even easier. The top was film and the bottom was digital.

This was also shot on Cinestill 800T but this time the two pictures were actually taken at almost exactly the same time. The film photo is pretty bad – there just wasn’t enough light for a decent exposure (or I messed up the settings, which is very possible).

Oops, flashing the film

These two photos were from the start of the roll where I hadn’t loaded the film correctly so had to pop open the back of the camera to adjust it. The big streaks over the images is from the resulting light leak.

Conclusion

It was a lot of fun but I’ve moved on now, and not just because I dropped the camera down some stairs and made the lens square-shaped.

Although some of the photos do have a cool nostalgic quality to them, there is a reason that digital has (for the most part) replaced film. I’m not trying to blame film for the fact these photos aren’t brilliant; I don’t think I could take dramatically better photos using a digital camera. It’s just that in terms of tightness of the feedback loop and convenience for the end user, I think digital wins.