Who I am, what I do, and why I do it

So today I decided to start a blog for my film photography activities. My name is Alex Barnes and I run a (tiny) business called D.H. Photoworks. Primarily, I've been using digital for my gigs and film for my personal art stuff. However, recently I've been contemplating moving to film for my gigs as well and letting my interim assistant use digital. My reasoning is that I tend to take better pictures on film than I do with digital.

Took this picture of my dog with a Mamiya C220 TLR using Fuji Velvia 100.

Why you may ask? I don't know. Maybe it's the fact that film costs money per picture so I feel like I need to put more effort into the picture with film than I do with digital. Or it could be that I simply like the older, more simplistic film cameras (if you can call my Canon A2 simplistic) more than the newer, more complex digital ones available now. Whatever the reason is though, I much prefer film grain to digital noise.

An example of how film grain is beautiful. I took this with Kodak P3200 with a 50mm f1.8 lens.

Now, I've been into photography for awhile, when I was around 10 I found my dad's Canon AV-1 (which I still have)
 and began figuring it out and taking pictures with it. However, in 2011 I began taking photography more seriously and asked for a Canon Rebel XS for Christmas, which I got. It wasn't the greatest camera, but it was adequate for a beginner photographer. Less than a month later, in January of '12, I began taking classes at my local community college and signed up for a photography class. This where my love of black and white film came from. This class taught me how to process and print film, entirely in analog format. The next semester, I took the follow up class which taught us more advanced darkroom techniques such as sepia toning and how to operate view cameras.

One of the pictures I took for my best friend to show off her makeup. I used my Canon AV-1 for this with expired Fuji Superia I bought from Walgreens.

After finishing, I worked through the year of '13 on building up my portfolio of pictures by going out and taking candid shots of my friends and doing the occasional photoshoot to show off the makeup skills of my best friend. By the end of 2013, I had over 100 different images for my portfolio and I felt like I was ready to begin offering my photographic services.