For the Love of Film
Sometimes Hayden, a fellow Hong Kong exchange student, and I spend hours meandering around the city searching for picture perfect moments to take with our film cameras. It’s awesome because it gives us an excuse to see new places without having a specific destination.
Hayden does something called “double exposure,” which means combining two photos (exposures) into one image. It’s technically an error you make when you don’t wind your camera all the way, but some people do it intentionally to create cool effects. It’s really difficult to master this effect, because on top of it being regular film where you need to consider basics like adjusting the aperture and shutter speed, you also need to remember what the first shot looked like and whether the two photos will look nice when merged together. Plus, it’s film so you only have one or two shots to experiment with, and won’t find out how they’ve turned out until days (or weeks) later once they’ve been developed. Not many film photographers do the double exposure technique, but Hayden is one of the rare few.
Sometimes it’ll take him days before he finds or comes up with an idea for the second half of the photo. He’ll take the first photo, wait a week, then take the other — even if it means missing out on other shots in the meantime.
Both types of art that I’m used to — ceramics and interaction design — allow for a decent amount of space to experiment and edit with. In ceramics, the clay can be drastically molded and sculpted for several days until it’s fired, and with interaction design (Adobe Illustrator and such) I’ll spend hours obsessing over whether a tiny graphic or button should be one pixel to the left or to the right. But with film, you can’t do that. Not with the same photo, at least. Film to me is about escaping the world of edits and overthinking-ness. It’s about accepting the world and its people raw and embracing its imperfections.
I hope that one day we can treat life the way Hayden crafts his photos— with spontaneity, patience, rarity and a genuine, unmasked portrayal of our true selves.
You can check out Hayden William’s full photography portfolio here.
