©Bryan Formhals
Sometime a few years ago I read that Trent Parke used Delta 100 and pushed the shit out of it. Reading this meant I had to have the film, even though I had no dark room skills to speak off. At the time I was shooting Trix, Delta 3200 and Neopan 1600, and had no idea what I was doing, but it didn’t matter really because I was just burning through film making photographs.
I bought this Delta 100 and thought I’d try to be Trent Parke, but after about one roll I decided I wasn’t going to push the shit out of the film and had no intention of learning the dark room at my age. Exposing for 100 speed film even in the nice California light was too much for me. I needed fast film, so the Delta went into the fridge and followed me around for a few years.
As the summer of 2009 came to a close I was running out of film and tired of shooting 35mm color. I’d spent a good time wandering around shooting 120 color and found a groove that made sense to me. But I’m rarely satisfied doing one thing at a time, and I had grown to love shooting with the Contax T2. I needed something else. I’ve always dreaded winter (why I moved to California in the first place), so I looked in the fridge and saw these seven rolls of Delta 100 staring at me and figured, why the hell not. I loaded up the Contax and a vague idea for a project.
It didn’t start well. I took some night strolls and flashed random shit, but never really what I wanted to photograph, or what tone I was going for. I shot two rolls, got them developed, then scanned them. Two or three photographs caught my attention. They fueled my initial idea, so I went out again, at night wandering around. It was still a struggle, but I was determined to keep shooting. I knew that feeling nothing was something. This was the inspiration. Fight. Move forward. Make photographs, something will happen.
As with all ideas, the initial stages are the most difficult, but eventually you fight through them and through scanning and editing you start to see patterns, ideas emerging. This is the exciting part for me. Once I have images to work with I can go back into the field and refine the ideas. I feel this is something that’s been trilled into my mind by watching Hin Chua over the years. Repetition, persistence, hustle, and above else, photographing even when you don’t feel like it.
I burned through those initial rolls and ended up buying more. Now the project is a passion. The last couple of weeks every time I leave the apartment I can barely believe what I’m seeing. I just dropped off four rolls at the lab. I don’t remember what is on them, well kind of, in that magical way of photography. There will banality, misfires, missed opportunities, but I know there will money shots and building blocks. Whenever you think photography has abandoned you, it taps you on the shoulder and reminds you why you do it.