As a family who carries a camera everywhere we go, it is only natural for my kids to be interested in photography.

The easy route is to hand them a cell phone and say, here’s a camera for you, and that be it. Though these are very powerful cameras and 10x better than the digital we had when we were young, that is a good way to let that spark get extinguished.

One of my goals this year and the reason for making a website, was to get back to the process of slowing down and not just trying to churn out work to be scrolled past on a screen. With this workflow, film is a perfect medium to help aid this. By film standards, black and white is the most economical to use since you are able to develop this at home and scan / print anything you’d like. Color is possible, but not as forgiving or as cheap as b&w. It takes the entire experience from shooting the image to developing the final print and makes you apart of the process.

Let’s face it, computers are fun, but kids want to physically use things and get their hands dirty. That is why recess is still all the kids favorite part of the day, even over computer lab.

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. If you want to feed the natural desire to learn in kids, film is pretty darn cool. What else uses chemistry, light, refraction and buttons to press to make something happen? Of course this is going to peak a child’s interest! When they said they wanted to learn, instead of handing him a digital camera on auto, we actually started by opening a photo book to talk about the importance of photography in history. Still to this day, looking at an edited contact sheet all marked up makes me smile.

Film is also a really great way to start teaching about focus, exposure, light sensitivity and all the other nuances that goes into making a picture come out. In the long run, digital is a much smarter and easier medium to adapt, but try to explain what ISO is compared to a roll of 400 speed film they load in the camera and why that has an affect on your shutter speed. A film camera has a tangible object for each corner of the exposure triangle you can see and feel which makes learning even more hands on.

Make it fun. We take a walk as family each night and my son has been bringing my Nikon along, unloaded, so he can practice his focus and exposing to the different light. He gets to keep practicing with the enjoyment of pressing the shutter and hearing the camera fire, but not wasting any film. What 11 year old boy wouldn’t like that? With practice, he also gets to look forward to loading his first roll of film and being able to complete the process of shooting, developing and then seeing his contact sheet afterwards to select photos.

I am thankful and excited to keep sharing this journey with my kids and look forward to their own work in the future and having these memories.