12 months on film - part one
January-March 2024 and some thoughts on feeling uninspired in your own city.
Last year I took part in an Instagram project for film photographers called 12 months on film.(If you want to join, the project is still on for 2025).
The concept was simple: Shoot a different roll of film each month using as many different film cameras, as you have.
Although I didn’t manage to finish the project (I just sent off my September and October rolls to have them developed...), I thought it would be fun to write a few status posts and share some of my favorite photos from the project. Because even if I ended up not doing it the way, it was meant to be done, I learned a lot from it.
Parts of the following text have been previously published on my personal website.
I own three film cameras (and one Polaroid), out of which I basically only use two, so I knew from the beginning that my focus for this project would be on the choice of film. I was looking forward to trying out something new, as I always end up with the usual safe choices (Kodak Portra 400 for colour and Kodak t-max or tri-x 400 for black and white).
I found out about the project a few days into January, and since I already had an almost new roll of film loaded in one of my cameras, I decided to use it as my first set up. There was nothing new here. Good old Kodak Portra 400 and my Contax TVS point and shoot camera.
January is normally a very quiet and (I admit) slightly boring month to me. Nothing super interesting happens, and all my photos were taken at home or on walks around my local neighborhood. While not paying too much attention to what I captured, I did try to focus on colors in order to get at least some kind of theme for the month.
In February something interesting happened.
For quite a few years I have struggled to find (new) things to photograph here in Florence. The truth is that for quite a long time I have been taking photos of the same places and the same subjects. And I have to be honest: After almost fourteen years of living here, I am absolutely uninspired by Florence in terms of photography.
For years I have forced myself to get out and take photos anyway. I would go for long walks with my camera, I would bring the camera out, as soon as the light was special, and I even made some dedicated photo trips to specific locations, which I thought would inspire me and spark my creativity. But it never felt quite right.
As I began this new project in January, I quickly realized that I was never going to be able to shoot 12 rolls of film in Florence. It would be boring, and it would be a total waste of film and money.
So after years of fighting against what is probably a quite natural condition after being in the same place for many years, I finally allowed myself to give up and stop looking for things to photograph in Florence. Instead I got a brilliant idea.
Florence is one of the best located cities in Italy, when it comes to day trips. From here you can reach so many nice places by train in just a few hours.
So I made a promise to myself (and to my daughter): That from now on we would take one or two day trips every month to visit a different city. We both love traveling by train, seeing new places is always fun, and finally it would be the perfect way to find inspiration again and photograph something different than Florence.
So in February we went to Pisa. It is just an hour by train from Florence, and it’s a relatively small city, where you can walk around to everything and easily see the most important things in one day.
I decided to grab my “third” camera – the one I never use. It's an old Praktica LTL, and up until then I had only used it with black and white film.
For the first time I loaded the camera with Kodak Portra 400 (I know – same old, same old, but in this case I had a small stock, I wanted to finish, and since I hadn't tried it with this camera before, I thought it would be ok).
The Praktica LTL is a camera, which I don’t trust very much, and which I am not very good at using, but the outcome in terms of exposure and focus was actually better, than what I had feared. The images however were quite awful, so I’ll share just one - for the sake of consistency.
After the first two months of shooting Kodak Portra 400, I made a big online order of different kinds of film, which I had never tried before, and so for March I went with Kodak t-max 100 and my good old Canon AE-1 Program.
This was my first experience with a black and white ISO 100 film, and I have to say, I loved it. Very soft and clean photos. And my beloved Canon AE-1 Program never lets me down.
March is the month of my birthday, and this year we decided to take a day trip to Venice to celebrate.
After Venice the camera stayed home until the end of the month, where we went to Copenhagen for Easter, and this is where I finished the roll.
Feel free to share your thoughts, if you have done a nice (or even a not nice) photography project, or if you have something planned for the future. I would also love to hear about your experiences, if you, like me, have felt uninspired in your own city, or if you have felt tired of photographing the same places over and over again. How did you handle this?
Stay tuned for part two of the 12 months on film project.
Really enjoyed seeing your take on this project. I'm doing it in 2025 and hope to learn a lot!
So delighted to see you share the project! And so happy to have you again! 🥰📸