Open-Shut – A One-Shot Story And A Meditation on High-speed Film

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
— Benjamin Franklin

High-speed film has been keeping me up at night. It whispers my name, taunts me, dares me to be dirty. But we just don’t get along.

There’s always one roll of T-Max P3200 in my fridge, buried beneath a pile of FP4 or Kodak Gold, but I rarely reach for it. I like my women sharp, my whiskey neat, and my film grain fine.

Now and then, I’ll let loose, grab a canister of Tri-X or HP5, even push it a stop or two. But the heavy stuff, the stuff with 3-2-0-0 on the box is a step too far. It’s more grain than this five-foot-six, hundred-and-forty-pound man can handle.

But we all get desperate. Say it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m looking forward to a few hours of carefree photography. I open the fridge for a roll of Ortho 80 and what do I find? A lone box of Delta 3200 staring up at me. “Well, fuck it,” I say to myself. “I guess it’s better than nothing.”

In my experience, unfortunately, many high-speed films aren’t much better than having no film at all. Maybe that’s more a reflection of me as a photographer than the quality of the film.

But this isn’t a one-shot story of failure, of blurry mediocrity, of grain pain. No! It’s one of success, of overcoming a high ISO, of taming the wild SOB that is T-Max P3200.

Indeed, for every fifty or so shots of high-speed film, something clicks, and it’s more than the shutter of my Leica MP. For forty-nine frames I’ll be kicking myself for buying such a blunt knife of a film…Then suddenly the grainy gods will bestow me a real keeper, a shot that opens the aperture of my dark photographic soul.

At the top of this page is one such photo. Titled Open-Shut, it is a picture of my wife and son lying together after a long day. It was captured on T-Max P3200 using a 50mm Summilux f/1.4 aspherical lens. It’s grainy, it’s blurry, it has high ISO written all over it. But I love it.

And so, like an addict at a slot machine that spits out a winner every so often, I’ll keep returning to high-speed film. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t know what it costs to pull the leaver on the slot machine called T-Max P3200.

I hope you enjoyed this story. If you want to follow more of my adventures on film, please consider following me on Instagram. You can find more of my photos at Leica Fotografie International.

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