Let me take you back in time to 1988. I was 14, I’d recently bought my first SLR camera, loads of different films, some darkroom equipment, various smelly chemicals, kit bags and a couple of lenses. A journey had just begun, a trip that’s still on the go, an adventure which has never stopped. Back then you had one choice – Film. OK, maybe not ‘one’ choice as such, film provided many alternatives and varieties – B&W, colour, colour slide, 35mm format, 120mm format, Polaroid and more. Different makes – Fuji, Kodak, Ilford, Agfa… Different film speeds – 25, 64, 100, 200, 400, 800… lots of variety. That’s how I started to learn about exposure, light, time and how to experiment and test. I discovered the ‘correct’ way to do things and how to push the capabilities of what film could and couldn’t do.

Things have moved on, it’s nearly 2012, the world is driven by 0’s and 1’s and we all enjoy our technologically fuelled lives. Photographers are renowned for being gadget geeks (well, all the ones that I know are, myself included). The digital age of image making has brought many new and exciting ‘things’ to play with, make life easier, faster, better. The opportunities for photographers to experiment and test are just as varied and diverse compared to 20 or 30 years ago, just different – Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhones, DSLR’s, lenses, etc. I still shoot film from time-to-time; although I tend to use it for more ‘experimental’ purposes in my personal work. I love crappy plastic cameras and obscure old machines that generate unpredictable results. But, I also love and NEED digital; I’d be totally and utterly lost without it – all my cameras, lenses, gadgets and software.

I process the vast majority of my work in Adobe Lightroom, it’s a fantastic piece of software, brilliant for editing and cataloguing/archiving. About a month or so ago I became very interested to hear about a set of presets for Lightroom that boasted the capability to replicate a film like quality with digital files. Mmm, I was definitely interested. I looked at a few examples of what it was claiming to do. I was definitely, definitely interested! The presets are made by VSCO– The Visual Supply Co. Lets get one thing clear, I have nothing to do with them as a business, but I will say this – I bloody love what they have made. Actually, they are more than presets, they are also camera profiles that work with certain Canon or Nikon cameras AND they also mimic certain traditional film emulsions – Kodak Portra, Ilford HP5, Fuji 160C etc. All of the above images were processed with nothing but VSCO and Lightroom. I’m hooked. I haven’t ditched Photoshop, far from it, but these presets/profiles are so much better than any others that I’ve previously used (there are many out there and some are totally rubbish). Do they have a film like quality? Yes, they do, and, as their sales patter says – ‘The Legitimacy of Film. The Editability of Digital’. It’s probably one of the best digital options to film that I’ve discovered. A good investment as far as I’m concerned.

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