Let’s just call it art

Let’s just call it art

Shooting film requires a certain amount of mindfulness. It’s a complex process with a lot of things that can silently go wrong. I’ve photographed a whole party without realizing that the film wasn’t loaded right and I hadn’t successfully exposed a single photo. I also literally ran over a Mamiya RB67 with a car after an otherwise successful Yosemite hike.

Every film photographer has their horror stories; as a somewhat irresponsible film lover I might have a few more than most.

In October 2016 I went on an bike tour across France armed with only a medium format camera. The camera I took was an untested Hasselblad 500/cm that I picked up on ebay a few days before we left. The owner had described a defect that I understood to mean the mirror didn’t always unlock after each shot until you gave it a wiggle. This would normally be a pretty inconsequential problem.

When I got my film back from the lab two weeks after the trip I discovered something baffling. Every photo was sideways, somewhat blurry, and not the scenes I photographed.

The problem was…
After a short investigation I realized that the real defect was the camera shutter did not fire when you actuated the shutter trigger, it only fired when you jiggled the camera to get the mirror to come back down. This means every exposure I got was whatever my camera was pointing at a few seconds after my intended shot as I fiddled with the camera; usually it was the ground.

For your enjoyment what follows are the best shots of a perfectly good bike tour seen through the delayed eyes of a defective Hasselblad. Let’s just call it art.

Bonus Round

I shot a few cheesy portraits for a friend with one of the rolls before I got the trip film developed.