World building and the quality of your product.
This is what your favorite photographer doesn’t want you to know: they are hand printing their work and shooting film.
I’ve known for years that my favorite photographers were printing their photos in a darkroom to get such amazing quality in their final images. I always told myself it wasn’t practical and that it was out of reach for me, but ultimately that’s bullshit. Where there is a will, there is a way—even if you weren’t born with parents who could buy your film in college.
So I gave myself permission to try one new thing a month this year and to invest in myself regularly. That thing was a three-hour color darkroom printing class. After posting those printed images, another darkroom reached out to me to print my work: Nice Film Club.
Ultimately, my goal here is to increase the consistency and quality of my final product, and I’m loving the results so far—even though it’s not cheap.
I’m currently working on a series on coastal New England that all harkens back to my childhood and my favorite memories. I think shooting consistently—or consistency of practice in any creative work—is a challenge. What makes it easier for me is including things that made time disappear when I was a kid. For me, that’s the beach in New England.
To explain why this is important, I’ll tell you a short story. I had a model on a shoot recently, and she asked me for advice on how to make a living as a photographer. On top of modeling, she’s in college for photography.
I told her: create the world you want to see.
You have to think of your creative work like a movie. Look at Tarantino—he has a style that runs like a thread through all of his films. The stories might be different, but every movie is distinctly gory, full of vengeance, and nostalgic. Same with Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, or Michael Bay. You can tell it’s their movie before the credits even roll—from the outfits to the way it’s shot.
A simpler analogy: if Hilton Hotels made a shoe, could you picture what it would look like? Probably not—and it would likely look like shit because Hilton doesn’t have a strong creative brand. But if Nike made a hotel, every American could picture it. I bet it would have a track around the outside and a basketball court in the middle.
You want to be so consistent with your world that people can imagine your next image—or what it would look like if you shot something completely outside your usual subject matter, but your style still carried over.
That’s why I’m sticking to one world for my personal work this year, and why I’m simplifying post-production. Consistency is much harder to achieve with digital work unless you can fully control the lighting.
Here are a few photos that Nice Film Club was kind enough to print for me.
