AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY + DIGITAL JULY 2015 AUSTRALIANPHOTOGRAPHY.COM 43
ABOVE
Hoi An, Market
woman, by Matthew
Sutton. Leica MP,
35mm lens, Kodak
colour transparency
EB3, ISO 100,
1/125s @ f/2.8.has captured something, and in the crucial calm and patience
required in processing and printing. Recently a number of
young enthusiasts sought his mentorship in learning film and
he steered them to doing research and work by themselves.
They came back pleased with their negatives, and their
discoveries. That is what it is all about, he says, and whether
you do all the work or a lab does some, the developing or the
printing, it doesn’t matter. In film there is a deeper truth, he
believes. Film doesn’t lie – unless you manipulate a scanned
image! From his experiences he ponders the technicalities
and techniques of film versus digital, and the emotional and
personal elements involved. Sutton believes that film is better
at capturing aspects of a scene, so a picture always reveals
something for the viewer, and even the photographer.
Peken is a photographer of 14 years standing who works
in newspapers and magazines in Sydney, and who has
photographed in various countries. His latest body of work,
The Lost Boys of Sudan exhibition, won critical praise and a story
on the ABC TV 7.3 0 R e p o r t. For his own work, black and white
film is his personal medium of choice. He says, “One of the
qualities of film is that inherently every frame is different. Film
is composed of minute silver particles. They’re never in the same
spot. If you work digitally, a pixel is in the exact same spot in
every frame that you take. There’s an inherent random nature in
film. Even if you can’t see it, by the very nature of the film each
frame will be slightly different, even if you were to take the exact
same photo.” Using a film camera slows you down and frees you up,
he says. Peken explains it slows you down because you can’t shoot
hundreds of frames each hour like digital and unlike digital, film
can take a long time before you see an image, especially if you have