As a style, I am always fighting to avoid taking “pretty” photos. As an art photographer, I try to create a feeling or reaction in both myself and the viewer. I don’t always chase golden hour to get perfect light; for me, it’s more about the scene and the moment in time. I feel my photographs convey isolation, desolation, solitude and openness, maybe even loneliness. Or you could say peace and serenity. I tend to be drawn to broken or decaying scenes, adding to that sense of alienation.

Why film? The simple answer: emotion. Film has a quality that evokes emotion in both me and the viewer. It’s tangible. Real. Authentic. Magical. Film is beautiful. Film is art.

When I find something worth photographing, I feel joy in loading the film and excitement in creating something. The process of meticulously measuring the changing light with an old light meter, working out all the variables, and then, once I am ready, that moment of pressing the shutter, not knowing if I got it right, excites me and creates fear at the same time. And just one shot. A fraction of a second of my life - what I see is transferred onto this magical piece of celluloid. And I feel content.

25 years ago, I shot film. Then digital came out, and like everyone else, I chased that instant gratification, the idea that you couldn’t mess it up. You could see the result straight away and just shoot again. In fact, shoot 100 times and one would be good. The files were clean. Super clean. And that’s where I started to lose my joy in photography. Shooting hundreds of images, trusting it would all come together in the edit, was draining me. I was losing the essence of capturing a single, beautiful moment in time.

I remember when it changed for me. I was in Sydney, taking photo after photo, constantly zooming in to check focus and review what I’d taken. And then it hit me. It all felt sterile. Endless white walls. No emotion. Just pictures. That weekend, I started deliberately shooting out of focus, trying to force some feeling back into the images, and into myself. When I got home, I pulled out my old Mamiya cameras, bought some film, and, for the first time in 20 years, I enjoyed photography again.

I develop all of my own film. Instead of spending hours culling hundreds of photos behind a computer, I turn up my music, mix up some chemicals, and spend the day developing my rolls. That sense of excitement, waiting to see if everything turned out as I’d hoped, takes me back to being a child waiting to open Christmas gifts. The joy is childlike. And then there’s that moment, after washing the film, when you nervously pull it from the tank to see the results. Holding something tangible that you created, lifting the negatives to the light and seeing an image is truly a magical moment.

Film is beautiful. Film is art. It’s something I think everyone should experience for themselves.