One of the hardest aspects of becoming a professional photographer is that it is all too easy to forget why you fell in love with photography to begin with. When it becomes your job, it stops being a hobby. At the start of this year I promised myself I would take more time to rediscover my passion for creating art for myself and not just for others. After years of shooting only digital, I was beginning to find I was getting bored knowing exactly what a photo would look like before I pressed the shutter. This was one of the reasons I started shooting film again last year. There’s something about the excitement (or fear!) of not knowing if you had got it right, and more interestingly, if you hadn’t got it right, what would it look like?

I wanted to find a way to recreate that feeling when shooting digital, which is why I began experimenting with long exposures and adding some camera movement. The technique is one which has been used to great effect by some of my favourite photographers, including Trent Parke, Olga Karlovac and Alison Mccauley. When combined with monochrome it creates a mysterious and ghost-like effect, and I love the fact the camera is capturing something that can’t be seen by the naked eye. I also love the collodion wet plate work of Sally Mann, which although a different technique, it creates a similar effect where it is the imperfections and accidents in the process that give the photos their character. Mann herself used to embrace and even encourage these accidents by deliberately breaking the ‘rules’, which gave her new ways to be creative.

These images were all created using either the Fujifilm X100V or X-T3. The X100V is ideal for this type of work as it has a built-in neutral density filter which makes it easier to shoot long exposures.