Thiago Silva: Made in Brazil! - A Photographic Story

Tip # 1 - Give your child a camera

Giving a child a camera can be fascinating, their “bottom-up” perspective offers a fresh way of seeing the world, and you might also be surprised by the imagination and creativity children posses! Sadly, this creativity often fades as we are trained by school, work, and life to become functional, logical, almost robotic humans. One thing we should aspire to do is to get back some of that childhood imagination and creativity, that way we will never run out of new photographic ideas!

My Parents followed Tip one, Brazil - 1999

At the time, of course, the amount of pictures per day and trip were a budget thing and so, quite limited. I was never able to just shoot away like anyone can do these days with digital, as that would result in irritated parents ranting over some exposed film. But as I said, it was APS film, in Brazil, and that little Minolta had a CR2 lithium battery. All quite unconventional things even by today's standards! Back then I remember the stores having virtually no APS film, and most photo labs only developed 35mm. Even when we eventually found a lab that could process APS film, the negatives were often poorly developed or even destroyed due to the lack of experience with that new and unconventional format.

Tip # 2 - Choose your film camera wisely

Choose your film camera based on the price per exposure, including the cost of film and development, as well as the availability of film. While buying an APS film camera or a 110 cassette film camera may seem inexpensive at first glance, the cost of film and development can be extremely high. At the time of writing, I know of only one producer, Lomography.com, that still makes 110 film, but APS film was discontinued years ago.

No cheap film for this Weathermatic A

When my grandparents moved from Europe to Brazil following their retirement, my grandfather brought a truckload of never-seen gadgets, including no less than seven cameras, two film projectors, a film splicer, tripods, projector screens, and more. However, being the “museum curator” type, he never allowed anyone to use or even touch his gear. So, the cool cameras sat unused in their camera bags and camera cases, inside a damp, dark tropical closet for 20 years. Luckily, most of the leather and optics survived without mold and fungus!

Tip # 3 - Use your gear!

If you're not using your gear, sell it or lend it to someone who will. Optics will get moldy and leather parts deteriorate, especially when stored in humid conditions. Lens fungus is particularly tricky, it grows on the coating of your lenses and slowly ruins them. It can also spread to other gear, like any infestation. But remember, the best defense against lens fungus is to regularly use your gear, as exposing it to UV light will kill it. You should also keep your lenses (not for a long time, remember? Go OUT and shoot!) in a dry environment and clean them, after rainy or dusty shoots, paying special attention to remove any organic matter from the optics such as saliva or fatty fingerprints, as that is food for fungus. I use isopropanol and a microfiber cloth to clean the front and back elements of my lenses, but be careful not to clean the numbering/text on your lenses, because isopropanol might remove the ink.

Upside down? Right side up? Just use it! Brazil - 1995

Eventually, I started spending time alone at my grandfather’s house, where he kept his cameras. That’s when I got my hands on my first SLR: his Minolta SRT 101. When it was released in the 1960's, this camera was simply groundbreaking, and for me it still is a revolutionizing camera, time jumping the user back to when things were simpler, well thought and made to last! I think most of today's cameras will not be working in 50 years time and definitely none will be working reliably. My grandfather had upgraded on to a Minolta 7000AF, leaving the SRT all alone... I think the 7000AF was a game changer to his work, enabling him to get the fast shots of moving subjects completely sharp without having to fiddle around with manual focus, apart from the fact that with the SRT he would have had to wind every shot.

Tip # 4 - Master your camera before upgrading

Often, if something is wrong with your prints or digital photographs: lack of sharpness, incorrect exposure, unwanted motion blur, it’s because you have done something wrong. Learn the limitations of your gear and master it before considering an upgrade, but also know when it is time to invest. For example, shooting wildlife with a manual focus camera isn’t impossible, but an autofocus camera will significantly improve your success rate by allowing you to focus more on the subject and less on sharpness, so if wildlife is what you shoot most of the time, get a good AF camera! The same goes for shooting a lot in low light at low ISOs without a tripod.

Or consider an upgrade if your gear still uses 3+1⁄2 inch magnetic discs...

By the way the picture above (from the 10x Zoom camera)was taken by the "upgrade" 1.3 MP Mavica. Notice an Improvement?

But even a Mavica can be versatile and enjoyable. Oh the Disk Drive whine, so lovely....

Take it out on a cold snowy winter day? No problem!

On my 13th birthday, my grandfather finally lent me one of his cameras, a silvery, plasticky Canon Super-Prima 120 AF point-and-shoot (Today I own this little camera, let me know if you want a review on it)! I was ecstatic and finally able to spend time together with my love at first sight hobby! It wasn't long until my first roll of film was developed and I sadly had to return the camera.

Realizing how much I enjoyed photography, my parents bought me a simple 35mm fixed-focus film camera. Unfortunately, it was no fair comparison to the Canon, and soon I felt underwhelmed by the features of the little camera and it too ended up left forgotten inside a drawer. By 2006, film was becoming harder to find in Brazil, as digital photography was now all the rage. And guess who had just come back from Europe with a brand new compact digital Nikon? All I could do again was look at it's display and mesmerize the A4 office paper prints grandpa would show fresh from his inkjet printer. I remember the paper being soaked in ink, totally wet! I also remember the prints having no saturation, no contrast, no hunf. But at the same time I was amazed the fact that one could take a picture and immediately print it!

The transition from film to digital photography was a glorious moment for me, I think I feel about it much like the same way people feel about the moon-landing or the personal computer era. Exciting days!

With no film to shoot and the digital camera locked away in a closet, I felt that "love hurts", the pain of a “long-distance, platonic” love for photography. For me, love and hate aren’t opposites they are both the same, only in different directions. Let me explain: when you love something can’t have, what do you do? You don’t hate it; you ignore it, that is easier! Ignorance is the opposite of love. And that’s what I did for the next five years. I focused on school, machines, cars, but not my true love, photography. Yet, like a flickering flame, the passion never really died. But being in that no time,no camera situation, there was nothing I could do but ignore my love. Eventually, I found myself sneaking into my grandfather’s closet again, playing with the SRT 101 and gazing at slides on his projector. Photography was there, my love was there.

Years later, my grandfather brought me a Nikon Coolpix digital compact camera back from europe. It was a thoughtful gift, but by then, I had already mastered Ignorance and at first I had virtually no interest in using it! One day I did decided to take it on a trip, but as soon as I started making some videos, the little thing broke! I even took it apart (in Brazil there was virtually no way to get any warranty for something bought in Europe) and tried to see if I could fix it and even got zapped by the flash capacitor which burned a little hole in the tip of my finger. But all my effort was in vain, the camera had stopped mid-video and would not turn on again no matter what I did!

A couple years late I found myself in Leipzig, Germany for a work trip and ended up buying a galaxy S4 smartphone. At that time the galaxy S5 was the newest in town, but the S4 was all I could afford. Finally, I had a device with a camera, a usable camera! Then, just about 2-3 months later my loving grandpa, remembering how sad I was when the First Coolpix broke, brought me another Coolpix from Europe! Unfortunately at the time I had not enough technical knowledge to appreciate a Zoom lens and so, with my galaxy in my hand I was taking pictures, mostly of boring daily things, without any skill, any logic, any composition, just the plain old regular boring smartphone pictures, nothing particularly creative.

Tip # 5 - Don’t be a photographic egoist

Taking random phone pictures might serve as personal memories, but consider whether a stranger would understand the feeling or moment behind the photo. Is your picture conveying a message, emotion, light, smell, texture, feeling or experience? Or is it just another “meh” image? Share your experience, share your feelings, your Idea, not “just” your pictures.

Me being a photographic egoist... Green and blue colors right, so what?

By this time, I had moved to Europe and was living an adult life with bills to pay and a full-time job(which I still get nightmares from). A couple of smartphones came and went, including an Iphone 4s and an Iphone SE. I still miss the compact design, the feel and the performance of the first generation SE. I wish Apple would still make them like that! More and more often I found myself taking my coolpix out and about, shooting some landscapes until I eventually found myself tired of shooting (no pain no thrill) digital pictures only, so decided to go back and shoot film to force myself into thinking before firing every single frame. So I bought a Konica C35 AF that broke way too fast, didn't even made it trough 24 exposures and its Autofocus broke... Again I tried opening and fixing it, it was just a little piece of brittle plastic that had broken off..... But it ended up being yet another camera I was unable to repair. If only I had a 3D printer back in those days...

Even managed to get a Model to pose!

She was working just fine at first!

Until the C35 AF became just a C35...

My love for photography was reignited, and I got excited about shooting and developing black and white film. My friend Andi was the one who taught me everything about film development and also convinced me to buy a second-hand 120 roll-film camera, the Stafetta Duo, which even came with undeveloped film inside! That little camera was a great school, very unforgiving and very tricky to use. And Andi was an amazing teacher!

Thank you Andi for opening what would become flood gates into photography for me!

Not everyone has an "Andi" in his/her life, but if you stumbled upon my website starting your own photographic journey, you might not even need an Andi at all! Plus you can always reach out to me if you need any ideas or tips! If you like my work, consider supporting or donating.

Andi servicing his "mechanical printer"

Sometimes things went quite well with the Stafetta

Other times it all went terribly wrong...

Soon I progressed to half-frame 35mm, becoming an obsessed "half-framer". If you are not familiar with the concept, in a nutshell these cameras turn your 36 exposure film into 72 exposures, exposing only half of a full-frame with each shutter release. Think of it like the perfect turbo-holiday camera. No time to look, just go, snap some pictures and move on. Develop the pictures and enjoy the scenery later! And exactly that is the beauty of the half-frame. These little cameras allow you to enjoy shooting film with half the cost. The downside is that you have around half the resolution, but this will only be relevant if you plan to make HUGE prints. A4 sized prints should be fine with your half-Frame negatives.

My first half-frame was the Olympus PEN, I remember being so excited after buying this camera on ebay for 50 bucks that as I went to pick it up that same night. To my misfortune, I forgot to follow the lower speed limit on a section of roadworks, resulting in a strong and warm red flash of the speeding camera and the PEN ending up costing 170 bucks. Well, true love does not come cheap, or as they say easy come easy go. For the matter of fact I still own this Olympus PEN and regularly take it out for a shoot. After the PEN I owned an AGFA parat II, Andi then lend me his AGAT 18k and finally I ended up buying the ultimate full-auto SLR half-frame, the Yashica Samurai! I plan to write reviews on all of these cameras, so let me know which ones you are interested in so I can focus on that review first.

Yashica Samurai - Two frames in one

Carcass
Agfa Parat I - Click to see a full half-frame

Yashica Samurai - Vertical frames - Click to see the second frame

Changing point in my photographic life was a visit to Brazil to see my family in 2019. I had brought with me rolls of BW film and the AGAT 18k from Andi. I proudly showed the camera and some prints to my grandfather who then, rather reluctantly came to the idea of giving me an old camera of his. So, finally after only 10 years, 10 years of sitting unused in a dark cabinet, we were re-united and so the SRT101 became officially my first SLR!

One of the Agat 18k pictures I showed my grandfather.

Tip # 6 - Get an analog SLR

If you're excited about photography, get yourself an old film SLR. You can find them cheap, and at the beginning, you don’t even need to load film in it. Just use it to learn composition, to see through the viewfinder, and to get comfortable with the controls. This will help you understand if the hobby is something you’ll enjoy carrying around, or if it feels too clumsy and heavy. Chances are, you’ll either go to a lighter, simpler point-and-shoot camera and keep your SLR as a display piece, or, you’ll go from playing around with your SLR to diving into real film adventures color or black-and-white.

With the SRT101 in my hands, it was time to go on my first SLR shooting adventure: One day, one roll of film, 36 exposures in a nature reserve park in the middle of Brazil’s iron ore mining landscape. This nature park is a true oasis of 114,000 hectares of green amidst the scorched red earth. With film in my camera and little more information than having read the manual, I went hiking and shooting. I felt the need to change lenses for nearly every shot, just to get the hang of it and feel like a real “pro.” My girlfriend at the time, a real two-legged patience bomb, helped me by handing me the lenses and packing them nicely into the rucksack I was carrying. The day passed, filled with ideas, using all my compositional power—taking pictures of rivers, waterfalls, mountains, birds, and of course the monastery and its beautiful gardens. 35 exposures, 36, 37, 38, 39? 40?? Had the film torn from its canister? Was the camera not advancing the film, and had I exposed the same spot 40 times? I can’t describe how bad it feels to realize a whole day’s work is just gone! When I finally opened the back of the camera, under some thick bed sheets to see what went wrong, my mistake became clear. Despite reading the manual, I was eager to save some negatives and maybe squeeze out one more shot from the roll. I had disobeyed the step to cock the film advance lever with the back of the camera open to ensure the film spooled properly. It was a mistake that happened to me only once! (More on that in my eventual SRT 101 review.)

Photography, especially analog photography can be really complicated: so make sure you know what you’re doing and avoid painful mistakes by taking your time, testing, and reading before you go on that big shoot. Don’t rush into your gear setup.

The next day, I made sure the SRT101 was working perfectly, and voilà—my first roll of film was successfully shot on an SLR!

So, how did the pictures turn out? When I last developed film, I had only basic tools like a syringe and some water bottles. After returning from Brazil, I couldn’t find a syringe, so I decided to use a scale instead. But it turns out 1 gram of developer is not equal to 1 milliliter of developer! I had to make this painful mistake to relearn the basics of density. Rodinal, the developer I use, is denser than water, so my films turned out underdeveloped.

And this is the magic of film—you don’t just have to do things right; you have to do them right every step of the way!

Initially, seeing the negatives intrigued me, but I was actually happy that both the negatives from the AGAT 18k and the SRT101 were underdeveloped. It meant my grandfather's camera, after sitting forgotten in a closet for all these years, still worked just fine!

Underdeveloped Film SRT101 - This one is kinda recovarable

Underdeveloped Film SRT101

Underdeveloped Film
Feeding an adult - SRT 101

Tip # 7 - First roll of film on a new camera

The first roll of film with an unknown camera is always a gamble. Like an old clock, you don’t know if it’s running fast or slow until you let it run for some days. With a camera, it’s that first roll of film that tells you whether the tool is working.

Self-portrait during lunch break with a new toy. Time to play around!

For the rest of my Brazil trip, I continued to use my AGAT 18k and left the not-yet-tested SRT aside.

The SRT-101 is what really got me going. Soon, I moved to digital SLR and bought my trusty Nikon D700 with the 24-85 kit lens. What a camera it is! All the controls you need, a button for everything, built like a tank—solid, black, beautiful. It was love at first sight again. The loud clicks are music to my ears, and working with it is a totally challenging joy!

Where did my story go from there? A lot of self-study, actually! Books, videos, websites, experiments, and of course, field work. Travel, weddings, random shoots, and most importantly, a lot of self-reflection and criticism. With that, I always find myself experiencing moments of stress, the good, pleasant kind of stress, like a child feels on Christmas Eve just before opening all the presents. It’s the kind of stress that makes you want more, more (Shutter) clicks, more moments captured. I hope you get to experience even a bit of that kind of stress, the stress of enthusiasm, of making your ideas happen.

But what am I professionally? I have a wonderful full-time job in an optics-related field, and I’m more than glad I’m not a full-time event photographer, that would be too stressful and even boring at times. This way, I get to enjoy photography when I want to, exactly how I want it.

Photography, for me, is about getting out, no matter where, just out. I’m not a studio photographer. For me, the thrill of being outside, “vulnerable” to nature’s elements and light, is worth so much more than playing around with lights in a basement. I encourage you to go out and see for yourself how beautiful and interesting the world is, as long as you open yourself to discover it.

Sometimes, the best surprises are just around the corner

Stuttgart, Rotebühlplatz. Picture taken during an evening stroll. The plants were actually on the facade of this building, the picture was taken from street level looking up with a 24-85VR zoom lens at f4,2 for 1/20s at ISO1600. What you see in blue behind the plants is the March Sky at 6:38PM.