In the early to mid-twentieth century, Pyro found its most famous advocates. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and other Zone System pioneers relied on Pyro for its long tonal curve and ability to handle extreme contrast scenes. Adams’ negatives from Yosemite, printed decades later, still exhibit the smooth highlight roll-off typical of Pyrogallol development. Pyro allowed these photographers to “place” tones with mathematical precision — the foundation of the Zone System itself.

The 50mm f/1.5 Zeiss Sonnar from 1939 is one of the great optical designs of the last century. It belongs to an age before coating, before marketing language replaced observation. It was built to interpret light, not to control it. Mine is one of the last pre-war uncoated examples, mounted on a Contax IIa body from the early 1950s — the bridge between the pre-war world and the modern one.

In today’s world, it’s easy to confuse digital editing with photography. Scroll through social media and you’ll see endless images smoothed, graded, and altered until the original moment is barely recognisable. That isn’t photography — it’s post-production. It’s editing.

Shooting with film doesn’t just change how a photographer works — it changes how a model experiences the shoot. For someone used to digital cameras firing hundreds of frames a minute, the film process feels different: slower, more deliberate, sometimes even unnerving at first.

That’s why setting expectations is crucial. When a model understands what film brings — the rhythm, the limitations, the rituals — it transforms the session from uncertainty into collaboration. At Liquid Light Whisperer, this conversation happens before the first roll is loaded, because trust is as important as light.

Digital photography gave us precision, speed, and infinite repetition. It perfected the technical image — but in doing so, it stripped away something that analog never lost: a sense of life.

Film photography endures because it feels different. It slows us down, resists instant gratification, and produces images with texture and presence. In a world of disposable content, film stands out as something alive.

It’s not every day that a company like Lomography asks you to test a prototype. When their team invited me to run the new Daylight Developing Tank through its paces, I was genuinely pleased. Lomography has long been at the heart of keeping film culture alive worldwide, and being part of their R&D process — before the public even got a glimpse — was a privilege.

The result was a set of articles about my experience published across their international network in four languages.

When an image is exposed on film, it isn’t yet a photograph. It lives invisibly in the emulsion, suspended between existence and nothingness — a latent ghost of light. At this stage it can still be erased, fogged, or lost entirely, but it is there, waiting. Only when it meets developer does it reveal itself, and only when it meets fixer is it frozen forever. That alchemy — the moment when something ephemeral becomes permanent — is what makes film different. Memory doesn’t just appear; it is conjured, stabilised, and preserved.

Ilford Delta 3200 has long been my film of choice for capturing intimate, atmospheric moments in low-light scenarios. There is an unmistakable magic that emerges when you push a high-ISO black-and-white emulsion like Delta 3200 to its limits.

In an era dominated by instant digital results, film photography offers a tangible connection to the artistic process. Each roll is a journey—focused on mindful composition, thoughtful metering, and the craft of chemical development. The grain, the colour rendering, and even the minor imperfections all add character, reminding us that photography is more than just pressing the camera shutter button.