This is a story and a photo I wrote about on my Patreon as my once-daily photo and accompanying story. A bunch of people seemed to find it resonated; I am sharing it here.
Alright we're gonna mix it up again today: I'm gonna be a hater. Time to talk about instagram film photographers.
You already likely have seen the work of who I'm referring to; they're seemingly inescapable and there's now products (filters, LR presets, hell, even entire camera settings) meant to mimic their look. They usually shoot expensive-ass film (Portra is a favorite) and they are the reason I cannot afford a half-decent medium-format camera. This would be more tolerable if they used their cameras or their film for anything worth a damn. Their color tones are warm, sometimes to the point of orangely washed-out; their skies usually are pale, verging on teal, even in broad daylight at a clear 90-degree angle to sunlight. The photos they take are of the rear of a 60s-80s american car (not the entire thing) or photos of old motel and cafe signs. A lot of these photographers do not seem to have a distinguishable style from one another.
(These links are examples found by searching the "Portra" tag on Instagram; I have no idea how I'd feel about the photographers' general bodies of work. These are just the specific themes I see repeated constantly and by a lot of film shooters; perhaps these photographers have much deeper oeuvres than this.)
In any case, who I'm not talking about here are photographers like Patrick Joust. Patrick could be confused for who I'm talking about, theoretically. He shoots medium-format Porta, he repeats heavily on the theme of old buildings and old cars, and his work sometimes verges on the pastel.
The real difference between Patrick and my Instagram examples is that Patrick knows what he's aiming the camera at beyond "this is a popular subject to shoot". Every one of his shots has a sense of depth to its composition. When he shoots a partial car, he makes it count as part of a scene, rather than the complete image. The pastels are a natural effect from shooting brightly-overexposed skies to shoot for shadow detail in the morning or evening, rather than just broad daylight color toning.
It feels like you could walk into his images, because his shots, to me, are those of someone evaluating the world around them for interesting complete scenes on a variation (midwestern architecture, old American cars) rather than shooting subjects that look like other popular work.
And so my photo today is an example of a shot I believe is similar to a lot of the work I describe, but manages to be good enough to not fall into the trap of being boring. Old American car, old signage, vaguely pastel, bright sky, yes; but also, depth. Whether or not this composition was truly the correct one to make here, I don't know, but I dare you to look at this photo and point to a single subject. It's a scene and it feels like a place that actually exists, and the composition is to help point out the inherent beauty of the location, rather than to emphasize a single object I found.
Also, it's not on Portra.
If you enjoyed this, my Patreon is $4 and I post a high-res photo and an accompanying story every morning. Thanks.
