Indie Film Lab

5 stories

Indie Film LabCinemaThe Art of Film Photography: Techniques for Creative Shooting Explore creative film photography techniques from double exposures to light painting, plus project ideas to push your analog shooting further.

09.28

Indie Film LabCinemaHow to Mail Film to a Lab: The Complete Guide to Mail-In Film Developing Whether this is your very first roll or your five hundredth, that feeling of finishing a roll and wondering what’s on it never gets old. We love that part. But here’s where a lot of people get stuck.

09.04

Indie Film LabCinemaHow to Shoot Expired Film (and Actually Get Good Results) How to Shoot Expired Film Expired film has a reputation: unpredictable, risky, maybe a waste of a shoot.

08.05

Indie Film LabCinemaWhy Film? Because Digital Doesn't Feel Like This. Film vs. Digital: Why Shoot Film in a Digital Age? Let's be honest, you don't need to shoot film. Your phone has a better sensor than most cameras from twenty years ago.

04.24

Indie Film LabCinemaKodak Just Announced 6 New Professional Film Stocks, Ektacolor Pro & Ektapan Are Here Daaang, y’all. Today is a BIG day for the film community. Eastman Kodak and our buddy Tim Ryugo just officially announced six brand new professional film stocks and we’re still picking our jaws up…

03.25

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo