The Experience of Shooting Daily Life on Film

Shooting film and actually sitting down to review what you got are two very different experiences, and watching someone do it honestly, including the frames that didn't quite land, is one of the more useful things you can find on camera YouTube right now. 

Coming to you from Matt Day, this candid video starts with Day walking through his first roll shot on a 21mm. He's straightforward about where the lens worked and where it didn't. Wide open spaces at the shop gave it room to breathe, but Day admits the focal length is just wider than his instincts naturally go. He doesn't oversell the frames, and that honesty makes the evaluation worth watching if you're trying to figure out whether a 21mm fits your own shooting style. The shop portraits of Tyler in the stain room are where Day thinks the lens earned its keep, capturing both the subject and the surrounding environment in a single frame.

The second roll mixes workplace frames with a truck parade and a walk through a park, which is currently going through a significant renovation. Day talks about photographing the park during this transition with a longer view in mind, hoping the images serve the community decades from now. He was shooting at around 1/30 or 1/15 of a second at the truck parade, and he's upfront that some frames came out softer than he'd like. The skate park section is a small highlight: Day and his friend Ben found a makeshift setup with a kinked rail balanced on a manual pad, and Day grabbed a frame of Ben doing a nose manual with the city pool and its big slide sitting in the background.

The third roll is where the video shifts in tone. Day took his family to the Columbus Zoo for his wife Molly's birthday, and the frames from that day are the kind of personal documentation he openly says matter most to him. Lorikeets landing on arms and shoulders, his daughter Nora completely locked in watching birds, carousel mirror selfies with the boys: these aren't technically ambitious shots, but that's the point Day is making. He wraps the roll at Molly's parents' house in Zanesville, walking the garden and shooting the kind of low-stakes family snapshots that end up being the ones you actually keep. Day also takes a few minutes in the video to share a personal update about a significant change in his living and work situation that shapes the setting you see throughout. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Day.