When Motivation Came Back
I am certainly not the first photographer or creative who occasionally loses his motivation. That, however, doesn’t change how bad it can feel.
Earlier this year I went through a phase where I was stuck with new challenges in my day job, my favorite camera broke, and then its replacement. It felt bad. Really bad. Proper depression. And then my therapist fell seriously ill.
So here I was, left with little choice other than to muddle through or change things drastically.
Having one of the broken analog cameras repaired was a first step. I’ve tried a new service, outside Berlin, and was fast and thorough, but not exactly cheap. So, now that I had my Nikon F3 HP back, did I use it? Not really. My analog film consumption dropped drastically. Mostly because in the meantime I had swapped some of my digital cameras for newer models.
What really changed my mood and my motivation were two things - first, step away from my day job with a couple of weeks of sick leave followed by planned annual leave. During my time away from work, I’ve decided that I either had to find another job within the company I’m working for, or leave altogether. Coming back to work I raised my problem with a trusted colleague who pointed me to an internal solution. I went for it and am currently transitioning into that new role in another division.
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During my time away from work I tried to be as active as possible, also in terms of photography. One of those activities led me to a place that was on my bucket list for a long time - one of Berlin’s larger cemeteries, the famous Zentralfriedhof Berlin-Friedrichsfelde in the Eastern part of Berlin. Tellingly, it is also known as Socialists’ Cemetery as a lot of German Socialist revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Liebknecht and Socialist politicians are buried there.
The cemetery is a beautiful place. It’s basically like a large park with a lot less graves than I had expected. Compared to two famous cemeteries in Paris, the Montmartre cemetery where I went in 2023 or Père Lachaise which I had visited back in 1998, this one feels empty.
It was a sunny weekday morning, and I had brought my trusted YashicaMat 124 to shoot a new film that I had no experience with - the Foma Ortho 400. My hope was that it dealt well with what I expected to be a very green space. But when I got back the developed negatives from the lab, I was disappointed that the negatives were super dense and had very little separation in the grey tones. On top, the highlights showed some strong halation that I didn’t really like.
Despite having a good morning at the cemetery, I needed to make adjustments and took some mental notes that the Foma Ortho 400 is not working for me in sunny conditions. After the two rolls I shot that morning in the vicinity of dead Socialist heroes, I have still three rolls of Ortho 400 as 120 film. I might have to wait until fall or winter, when the weather is overcast or gloomy to take full advantage of this high-contrast film
But I had also ordered a 10-pack of 135 format Ortho 400. Still, the weather forecast promised a lot of sunshine. And then, one morning, it was cloudy. I hastily loaded the first of Foma Ortho 400 in my newly repaired Nikon F3 HP and mounted a macro lens on it.
Our backyard is usually in the shade in the morning even on sunny days, but certain parts are getting hit by direct sun already before lunch. I hastily shot the whole roll within the matter of an hour (that is less than two minutes per frame). I felt good after that morning shoot.
When I finally managed to pick up the developed roll from the lab, I was again slightly taken aback by the dense negatives. So much so that I scanned them twice with the Valoi Easy Scan, the second time with a much longer exposure time on my Canon EOS 90D.
As a result, I had a much better set of negatives than expected. After converting them with Negative Lab Pro, I ran some minor adjustments in Lightroom. But here is the thing - those hastily shot frames from that morning look gorgeous, with deep shadows, almost no blown-out highlights and a strong but very pleasant grain.
When going through the whole roll over and over again the other day, I felt my motivation to shoot again more with analog cameras returned.
I am now looking forward to use my Nikon FM2, which was the second camera that had broken and is now repaired, too. The film transport had become unreliable, making crunchy noises. For a test after the repair, I ran through another black and white film that is now at the lab. But I am sure that my remaining Ortho 400s will find their use in that camera too.
