# Quadromatic... - Site: Analog Industries - Author: Chris Randall - Date: 2010-05-11 - URL: https://analogindustries.com/2010/05/quadromatic/ Those of you that follow me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/Chris_Randall) have noticed that I have, of late, been spamming my [Flickr account](http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrandall/) with pictures of a decidedly analog nature. For some reason I got a wild hare (hair?) up my ass (in thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I'd prefer a wild hair in my ass over a wild hare, although neither seem terribly pleasant) this weekend to take actual pictures on actual film, in real live 35mm. The picture above is from a four-lensed Lomo Action Sampler, stuck out the window of my SUV as I was driving through our neighborhood. Now, to be honest, while I take a lot of photos and have since the early 80s, it's been at least a decade, if not longer, since I've last loaded a film camera, as I was an early proponent of digital. Some interesting things I learned this weekend: 1\. Film cameras were, and are, a pain in the ass. You don't know what the fuck you're gonna end up with, and you actually have to plan. The Lomo cameras I shoot with aren't exactly models of modern technology, so I have to actually give some thought to aperture size, shutter speed, and ISO. On my Nikon DSLR I can just snap away, adjusting on the fly, and one of the 30-odd pictures I take of every subject is sure to look okay. Not so much here, which brings me to... 2\. Just pull your wallet out of your back pocket, open it up, take out your debit card, and hand it to the first homeless junkie you find. And then tell him your PIN. That's what this shit costs. Well, it's not that bad, but by my math it's about US$0.50 every time I press the shutter release. Which makes me want to spend some quality time exploring point #1. 3\. It ain't like a bicycle. I burned two full rolls before I remembered how the hell to shoot a fully analog camera. My pleasant discovery, though: completely unlike digital cameras, where the photos seem kind of transient, when you take a roll of exposed film to the lab, and come back in an hour to pick up an envelope with a stack of photos in it, and you go sit in your car to see what you got, there's a certain... something... Completely undefinable. Don't get me wrong. I love my DSLR, and I'm currently snooping around the various camera stores for an upgrade path. But there's something to be said for pulling out the old shit and taking it out for a spin. What does this have to do with music? Same thing. Put aside the new hotness for a weekend and pull out My First Four Track and write a damn song. It may be a huge pain in the ass, but it'll do two things: first, it'll make you appreciate the toil and hard work of your local plug-in makers (har har har), and second, there's never any harm in some new (old) perspective. ## Comments (18) **Funkish Bass** (2010-05-11): Let's go back to the (good?) old days? Rather simplistic, Chris? I wish I had time to kill just to spend it relearning the redundant. We are better off this way. Tape, maintenance, splicing... in the real bin where it belongs. We've all been on a publicity shoot, it takes 100 photos to find a real good regardless the photographer, equipment, mood, lighting, time of day..... Most of the ideas behind the gear we used then aspired to today. Why go back? Hey, who was it that said most of the comedy behind the "futuristic" domestic technology in the Jetsons is lost on the youth because they have it now? **lazenbleep** (2010-05-11): i had a couple of months with my yamaha mt150 last year. pleasantly fun, yet undeniably crappy. and yes, i ended up thinking about what i was doing before i actually did it. plus you can flip the tape and go in reverse ;# **inverseroom** (2010-05-11): c41 home dev is indeed surprisingly easy. slide film less so but still doable. **Chris Randall** (2010-05-11): That's why the Good Baby Jesus gave us XPro!!! Develop that slide film C41 and the world becomes a strange and colorful place. -CR **Chris Randall** (2010-05-11): @Funkish: I dont't even remotely propose going back to "the good old days." Especially not for real work. Motherfucker's got a deadline, you know? I'm just saying that, creatively, sometimes it's helpful to work in an environment that is more idiomatic. -CR **Adam Schabtach** (2010-05-11): @Chaosium: As CR said, Silent Way (and its maker, Expert Sleepers) gets a hearty thumbs-up from me. It's a much nicer way to get CV out of a DAW than a MIDI/CV converter. It does have the drawback of eating up audio channels, though; if you want to run a bunch of CVs and audio I/O at the same time you need some pretty serious hardware. I'm using an old RME PCI card with three ADAT ports. --Adam **Darren "Gaylord" Halm** (2010-05-11): Fuck yeah with the old-school, analog shit this week! I'm actually going shopping for some old radios/tape decks/turntables/amplifiers in vintage-shop crazed Cold Springs today. Those pictures look great, its like the visual equivalent of warm filters. **Chaosium** (2010-05-11): Awesome, I've been loath to refit my Mini and hopefully with the right cabling I'll be able to run it off my Presonus Inspire. **machinesleet** (2010-05-11): Chris, a compromise might be something like the digital harinezumi which has its own unique way of colouring a picture, or video. **soup** (2010-05-11): I went back to shooting primarily on film a few years ago. I find I shoot a lot less, I take more time composing and often don't bother firing the shutter when I realize I'm never going to print what I'm looking at. It takes me at least half an hour in the darkroom to make a nice 16x20 print and I just don't have the time to print stupid shit. My photographs have gotten a lot better though. Obviously I waste too much time with photography to return to using four tracks but I will say the great thing about four tracks was they made you make choices which I miss with digital. **Chris Randall** (2010-05-11): That was kind of my overarching point. Nowadays, the normal songwriting method is to throw loops and plug-ins at a track until it starts to resemble a song. When recording was primarily tape-based, I was an odd duck in my genre as I wrote in the studio (much to the chagrin of the label footing the bills) but I still had to have a fairly clear picture of the result we were going for before we even striped SMPTE. While I don't relish the thought of listing to an MTR-80 rewind for half the day, I do think that it's possible to re-orient your frame of mind to make your time spent with modern tools more productive by the judicious application of a little anachronism now and again. -CR **inteliko** (2010-05-11): Is the RT60 album cover gonna be shot in film too? New controlling the old..now thats d shiz.. its being outsourced slowly by Goldbaby.. which is not a bad thing... **boothnavy** (2010-05-11): Thank you for this post. The world needs to remember sometimes... **Chaosium** (2010-05-11): I really need to remove my Holga from the trunk and use it more often. The mystery and wonder of lomography is somewhat mitigated by buying ten rolls of medium-format at a time, and getting them all developed, though. At least studios still develop medium-format in Seattle. Sooooo vaguely on the analog topic, but http://matrixsynth.blogspot.com/2010/05/iphone-directly-generates-cvs.html has anyone got experience with the "Silent Way" suite? Generating CV from a VST sounds pretty tempting. **Chris Randall** (2010-05-11): Adam uses 'em a ton. (Witness his Tango conversion video, which is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxT72SE3RrU ). All my CV/Gate stuff has been modified for MIDI, because that's how I roll, so I don't have anything to use 'em with. Regarding Holga film/developing, I suggest buying expired film packages from eBay and developing them yourself. Home C41 is fairly simple. A whole setup and a scanner capable of scanning medium format negatives would still be cheaper than getting 10 rolls of 120 developed with proof sheets. I mean, the whole point of using a Holga or Diana is to get fucked up photos, and what better way than to fuck 'em up yourself? -CR **adamkjohnson** (2010-05-11): I have always preferred the look and feel of shooting analog. Medium format, 35mm, the more hinky and barely-functional the camera, the better. Came from years as a photojournalist, pounding out standard feature photos on a digital SLR for a weekly paper. You just yearn for something more... tactile after a while. Of course, there's the flip side. I think I have about six rolls of 120 taken on my ol' Yashica A I can't get around to developing. And the light leak in my 35mm SLR has gone unrepaired for more than a year now. Funny that. **wgparham** (2010-05-13): As one of the poverty stricken, digital photography has been a godsend. I shoot much more than I used to. I still have rolls of 35mm b&w that I couldn't afford to get developed. I had a friend with a nice garage setup that I used to use to develop and print, but I live in a different state now so his good graces are out of the picture. I have had some sort of point and shoot digital for nearly a decade now but didn't shoot as much as I would like to have because of the limitations of the format. My in-laws gave us a decent DSLR last year, and I have shot a ton of pictures with it. Took me a bit to remember how to shoot fully manual, but it does come back. I found my wife's old beat up mid 80's Cannon SLR the other day, though. It's crusty as hell and probably leaks light like the Titanic, but I have really thought about shooting actual film again. The house we're in now has the space to put in a small lab. I have been toying with the idea of not printing anything. Just shoot the film and scan the negs into the computer. The lomo cameras look interesting, but a big part of me wants to go large format for my analog stuff and stick to DSLRs for everything else. And also I want a pony for Christmas... Oh, well. We'll see what happens... -WGP **dogmeat** (2010-05-19): I miss analog photo gear, but NOT the chemical processes. Digital cameras "feel" cheap to me and I have yet to see a viewfinder on one that approaches the clarity and accuracy of the Nikon F/F2/F3 - but the image quality and software tools available now are things I would have KILLED FOR twenty years ago. I've spent years of my life in darkrooms and will never get them back. The drudgery of chemical processes is what finally wore me out on the whole thing, and now that I don't feel the need for hard copy to share imagery it's much more pleasurable to create. I experiment more since memory effectively costs nothing after the initial investment. The one resource I don't have is time to wonder aimlessly waiting for something to catch my eye. Oh to be in college again, with all this luscious tech... Onwards.