Shooting a Local Event on Film

Having seen that a local youth group was planning on converging on the center of town to call for climate change-related reforms, I immediately thought the event would be a great way to practice my film photography as a photojournalist of sorts. The Nikon F, after all, was largely synonymous with photojournalism in the 1960s. I’ve used my Nikon F to photograph local protests in the past, and I’ve found that shooting faster-paced events like this on film can be an exciting challenge.

Although the event was a little on the quiet side, I still found decent subject matter to photograph.

Part of seeing an event like this is the way that professional photojournalists circulate among the crowd. To document that experience, I often find myself drawn to photographing the photographers.

After having shot only one roll of film—I never loaded the spare roll I had in my pocket—I thought to myself at the end of the event I didn’t get many keepers. I was delighted to discover upon scanning the roll that there were indeed several that I quite liked. I was also very pleased with the image quality that I got from Ilford FP4 Plus, and I’m encouraged to shoot more on that film stock.