Thirty-Six Frames Is Plenty

A roll of 35mm film gives you thirty-six frames, and I have come to think that is exactly the right number. Not a compromise, not a quaint limitation to be endured for the sake of the look. The right number.

I did not always believe this. For years I carried a digital body alongside the film camera, a kind of insurance policy, and I shot the way the insurance encouraged me to. Bursts. Brackets. Forty frames of a face turning towards the light, on the theory that one of them would be the one. Usually one of them was. I just could never tell you why, and neither could the photograph.

Film took that away, and I am grateful. When there are thirty-six frames in the camera and perhaps two more rolls in the bag, every press of the shutter costs something. Not a great deal in dollars, though that adds up. It costs a decision. You have to know why you are pressing it.

That small tax changes the way you stand in a room. You watch longer. You notice that the late light on the verandah is going to slide across her collarbone in about a minute, and you wait for it rather than firing at everything in between. You let a conversation run on past the point where you would normally have raised the camera, because you can feel the moment has not arrived yet. More often than not, it arrives. When it does, you are ready, because you have been paying attention instead of harvesting.

There is a line of thinking that says more frames mean more chances, and on paper it is hard to argue with. In practice, abundance makes you lazy in ways that are difficult to notice from the inside. You stop composing and start collecting. You defer every judgement to the edit, and the edit becomes a wearying afternoon of choosing between forty near-identical frames, none of which you really meant. The limit moves the decision back to where it belongs, which is the moment itself, with the heat on your neck and the subject in front of you.

It is also, I think, better for the people I photograph. A motor drive clattering away at someone is a peculiar kind of pressure. It tells them they are being processed. A single, unhurried frame, then a pause, then a word or two, then another, tells them something closer to the truth: that I am looking, and that I am in no rush. People relax into that rhythm. The pictures are better for it, though it would be hard to prove.

None of this means every frame on a roll is a good one. Far from it. A typical roll of mine has a few misfires, a couple of frames lost to a thumb or a doorway, several that are fine and forgettable, and if I am lucky, two or three I would hang on a wall. Thirty rolls, one keeper, as the old saying almost goes. The point is not that restraint produces perfection. The point is that every frame was a choice, including the bad ones, and you learn a great deal more from a considered mistake than from a lucky accident.

There is a practical pleasure in it too. The roll has a shape. It begins somewhere and ends somewhere, and when I get the scans back from the lab I can read a whole afternoon in sequence: the tentative first frames, the moment things loosened, the last exposure squeezed out in fading light because I could not bear to rewind with one left. A hard drive of four hundred files has no such shape. It is simply a quantity.

I sometimes think the number thirty-six was chosen by an engineer in Rochester for reasons of spool diameter and film base thickness, and that it is an accident that it suits the human attention span so well. Enough to work a scene properly. Not so many that you stop thinking. About the same number of good decisions most of us can make in an afternoon before we start to get sloppy.

So I load the camera, wind on past the leader, and watch the counter tick to one. Thirty-five more to go, and no hurry at all.