“You never know what you will get, but that’s why I love film,” says Scottish photographer Andrew Low on why he shoots with film so often. Instead of going down the traditional route for an album cover, Low decided to experiment. It paid off very well in the form of a top-five placement at the 2021 International Photography Awards.

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Even those among us who aren’t obsessed with pixel peeping often measure the effectiveness of a photographer’s technique by the sharpness of their images. If it’s not tack-sharp, we subconsciously tend to question the photographer’s skill level. I’d say that the best way to counter this is to produce images that are so captivating that the viewer tends to forget the concept of sharpness and become lost in the picture. Is sharpness so critical that we lose the message the photograph is trying to tell us? Low feels otherwise, and he often experiments with slow shutter speeds for some creative results.

The Essential Photo Gear Used by Andrew Low

Andrew told us:

Mamiya RZ67 Pro II

Mamiya 110mm lens

Sony A7iii

Nikon L35AF

Contax T2

Canon EOS3

My main camera is a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II with a 110mm lens, I love this camera because it works for everything I need, the waist level viewfinder allows me to maintain eye contact with my subject and doesn’t add any distractions, my go to film when using the camera has to portra 400 or 800 depending what i’m shooting, I just love the way it renders.

The Phoblographer: Please tell us about yourself and how you got into photography.

Andrew Low: My Name is Andrew; I come from a small town called Renfrew just outside of Glasgow. I started photography about three years ago. One day I decided I wanted to try out some new hobbies, so I tried a few, and photography was one of them. Since then, I ran with the hobby and put all my time and energy into it. Two years after starting, it became my full-time job, with me now being a commercial photographer for a clothing company called Little Lies. Over the few years of doing photography, I tried my hands at most styles, from landscapes which I started with, to cityscapes and street photography, followed by portraits, and I found that portraits was my kind of thing and stuck with it.

The Phoblographer: A very non traditional album cover. What inspired you to shoot this way?

Andrew Low: This album cover is heavily inspired by an American photographer called Jake Wangner. He does a lot of these slow shutter portraits, and I was always inspired to try them out. Prior to this photograph, I shot a few test shoots because it’s not an easy thing to do on film because you never know how it will turn out. The artist I shot this for came to me and said they loved what I was doing and said it would fit their style because they preferred to be slightly mysterious and hide their face. So this style was perfect for the cover.

The Phoblographer: Had you been practising the technique on a digital camera for a while, or was this an experimental shoot?

Andrew Low: It is a tricky thing to do on film because you never know what you will get, but that’s why I love film. I actually never tried on digital; I just jumped straight in and did a test roll when I was testing a camera. I did it on a pair of trainers in the studio just to get a feel for it, and I had to test out the camera anyways. After that first roll, I just put the steps into practice on people I knew or models that offered to be a part of it.

The Phoblographer: Given that you couldn’t see the shots until they were developed, how confident were you of the results?

Andrew Low: I’m usually pretty confident when shooting film; I never shoot any digital backups and so far have been lucky (touch wood!). But given that I had done it a few times with different results, I knew I had it in the bag when it came to this shoot. I think if you’re shooting film, you just need to commit to it and ...