I’VE BEEN SHOOTING FILM FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS …

I learned photography on film. I spent several years in the late ’90s shooting for newspapers, and have shot and developed countless thousands of rolls. I watched digital photography change the photo world completely and utterly. In newspapers, we embraced digital. The speed and ease were too hard to ignore.

But I find nothing truly enjoyable about digital photography, as efficient and convenient as it may be. It’s clean, fast, and often forgettable. Film demands attention, patience, and trust in the process. There’s no instant feedback, no delete button, and ‘spray-and-pray’ gets really expensive… What I love about film and making prints under a red light in a darkroom is how physical and deliberate it is.

Everything you see here is made by hand (but for the digital captures of the prints, yes, I see the irony), from exposing the negative to a final print. For me, there’s a kind of truth in that, a record of not just what was photographed, but how it was made. The imperfections are part of the point.

This site is where I put my work, as much as a journal for myself as anyone else…

— Robert Koopmans
Kamloops, BC

r_koopmans@mac.com