We've developed Grainmaker over the last few years to be a useful set of tools to add analogue charm, texture and grit to digital photographs. We've leveraged running a film lab to create something we think is pretty special, but why? What is this all about?
Five years ago we started our film lab. A post-Covid lockdown boom was happening and it felt as though everyone wanted to suddenly go outside and capture special moments on film. I'd been personally shooting film for almost ten years prior to the lab getting started, and by chance caught the right wave and rode it out.
Film simultaneously took off, while at the same time running into production issues and price spikes. Secondhand cameras became more and more expensive, cheap, new, plastic cameras flooded the market, and film for a while there was hard to get and kept getting more costly.
In the five years since, film shooters have held on tightly and weathered the storm, but also within that time, a lot of patterns and trends have shifted. Anecdotally, we've seen a lot of photographers move from the ever-expensive film format to a more economical digital workflow, we've seen customers go through a handful of broken film cameras to eventually surrender to picking up a reliable, new digital camera. We've seen online tastes and style morph and more experimental and daring photographs start to grab audience's attention.
We started developing Grainmaker a few years ago when we noticed these patterns emerging. Personally for myself, I also started shooting a fairer mix of film and digital, and wanted my digital photos to feel as close to my film ones as they could be.
Two years have gone by while I've dove deep into what makes a film photo have that certain 'magic.' is it replicable? Is the magic of a good film frame from the emulsions? the cameras? the lenses? the digital sensors in the scanners? I began pulling on every thread possible - deconstructing and reconstructing every part of the process.
There may just be some inexplainable magic to film that can't be answered in a straight-forward linear explanation. An ever changing set of variables that sways between users, cameras, film stocks, labs, processors, scanners and styles. We've tackled this challenge as methodically and meticulously as we can though, and believe we've been able to capture some of that spark.