Written and Photographed by Simon Gilmer

Artist

My name is Simon Gilmer and I'm an architecture student from Frankfurt in Germany. I started photographing about one and a half years ago but switched from shooting digital to shooting film about six months ago. Shooting film really helps me focus on the quality instead of the quantity of images and stops me from taking meaningless pictures. I mostly focus on photographing structures and minimalistic still lifes.

Gear and Film Stock

I usually use a Minolta Cle with a Voigtländer Nokton 40mm/f1.4. My favorite film to use is definitely Portra 400, the natural colors perfectly fit my style and the weather in Germany is not always the best so the 400 iso helps a lot as well.

Taking my camera outside at night is nothing I do too often because I don't find that much beauty in the hidden. Finding exposed structures in natural light satisfies me a lot more. The only time I take my camera out at night every single time is when it is misty. When it's misty everything becomes so dreamy, it's the only situation where artificial light can really trigger any emotion in me because we don't only see the origin of the light anymore, we start to see it's a beautiful reflection in the fog. Such common and mundane objects, like a traffic light, can become so impressive and beautiful because something so organic/fluid gets added to it's simplicity. Not only the pictures share this intense loneliness and silence but it's also just great to feel it walking around with my camera. I took all those pictures in one night in October last year in my hometown Frankfurt, Germany.

Method

All pictures were taken with a tripod with exposures between 2 and 10 seconds. After getting my negatives back from the lab I scanned them at home with an Epson V600. No editing was necessary!

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