So I’m Nick. And I love film. And I want to shoot it as much as I can. Which is why I created Nick Collingwood Vintage.
I started getting into photography in my final year at Savannah College of Art and Design as an animation major. I had stumbled upon a Polaroid Land 250 camera I had bought years earlier for like 20 bucks at a garage sale and figured it’d be fun to resurrect it. I love tinkering with things and I was already buried in the enormous workload of an art student so why not take on another creative endeavor. No big deal. After splicing on a modern battery holder and duct taping it the the back, I was on my way. Luckily Fujifilm still made instant film for the camera in the now-ancient method of peeling apart the instant print from the negative.
Over the next few years, I took lots of bad Polaroids as I figured out the camera and some really great ones and happy accidents. I managed to wrestle my dad’s old Canon AE-1P 35mm SLR away from him and starting shooting lots of film. As a broke college kid, the cost of film got to me and I set aside film for a DSLR as ultimately it was cheaper. I still shot the occasional pack of instant film or roll of 35mm but largely moved to digital. After upgrading a few times and becoming quite familiar with digital, I began to grow bored of it and missed the aesthetic and feeling of shooting film so I gradually moved back!
I took both film and digital SLRs on a few trips but on my last few excursions, have only taken analog methods of taking photos other than my trusty iPhone 5s, now really showing it’s age. Around the same time, I ran into a German filmmaker while on lunch in NYC one day who was shooting with an old 8mm camera which is a format I knew nothing about. Intrigued by this film format I had never touched, I took his suggestion to look into Super 8 and dove in.
After my talk with the filmmaker, I quickly got myself a camera off eBay and some film that is surprisingly still being made and went to town. I shot everything from international trips, road trips, days at the park, a short film, and several weddings. I was addicted. Something about the format and the instant nostalgia it invoked captured me. And here I am. Starting a business shooting film. I have lots more to say about film but that’s for the future. I want this blog to be a place for me to post professional work as well as other musing on everything film.
So welcome