There’s something wonderfully timeless about black-and-white film photography. It’s what I shot my first film images with as a child, and it was what I used when I rediscovered film a few years ago, shooting medium format in a Rollei. It’s like going back to my photographic roots, but also to the roots of photography itself.

At the end of last year I started to experiment more with black and white film, shooting 35mm in my Contax Aria. With this year’s anniversary of the creation of Kodak Tri-X, arguably the epitome of black-and-white film, I thought I would take that curiosity to a new level by starting a 365, shooting an image a day on Tri-X and experimenting with all its formats: 35mm, medium-format 120 and large-format sheet film.

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It’s been an education in many ways. For a start, I’ve enjoyed learning to think in monochrome; it’s strangely liberating not to be distracted by colour and just concentrate on the composition and light while trying to capture the essence of each day in one image.

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It’s also been interesting to discover the characteristics of Tri-X under different circumstances, in different formats and with different cameras. When I load Tri-X 35mm into my Contax Aria, the resulting images are grainy and textured in a way that only film (and Tri-X in particular) can be. Whereas Tri-X sheet film shot with a Sinar large-format camera has amazing clarity and precision. Tri-X roll film shot with a borrowed Pentax 67ii is somewhere in between. Yet it’s all the same film, and (with help from my husband) I am processing all of it at home in the kitchen, with the same chemicals. Dev, stop, fix and bourbon, as my husband likes to say!

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Once the film is processed, and has finished drying in the bathroom, I’ve been scanning it and then, in effect, doing classic black-and-white darkroom “printing” in Photoshop. I’ve seen this done in a darkroom but I’ve never actually done it that way myself, so I’ve been learning all about adjusting tones and levels, getting the right greys to express the mood I want, and of course dodging and burning. And unlike a darkroom, my computer has an Undo button! So I’ve been combining the traditional and modern approaches.

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I’ve also been to several exhibitions of black-and-white photography lately, including Sebastião Salgado’s “Genesis” and an exhibition of seascapes by Ansel Adams. I’d seen their photographs before, of course, but now I have an even greater admiration for their work, and a greater appreciation of the classic tradition of black-and-white photography.

It’s all great fun, and I’m only four months into my 365. Come and join me on my adventure with Tri-X!

Kirstin