I first saw the prints while I was working as an assistant to a commercial photographer. They were from the photographer’s personal work, a body of black-and-white images, and the thing I kept coming back to was the grain. It was large and coarse, and it sat right on the surface of each image, so the texture became part of what the pictures were about.

I asked how they were made. The photographer was shooting Kodak T-Max 3200, a very fast black-and-white film. It’s built for situations where light is scarce and the shutter has to move quickly: sports, dim interiors, moments that won’t hold still. Nothing in this work needed that speed. The film had been chosen for what it did to the image, and the grain that came with all that sensitivity was the point.

So I bought some and started shooting with it, carrying that one element into the way I already photographed, with my own subjects and my own eye. At the time it felt like picking up a good idea from someone who’d had it first, and not much more than that.

For a while, the film type was all I borrowed.

Pushing the development

By then I’d been shooting and developing black-and-white film for several years. Thousands of rolls. Each one went through the same sequence of developer, stop bath, fixer, and wash, at set times, set temperatures, and set dilutions. Those are the standardized elements of the process, and after enough repetition I knew them well.

That familiarity made the switch to a new film type something I could build on. I started developing it aggressively, switching to a particular developer and mixing it at a much higher concentration than the standard called for.

The contrast climbed sharply. Blacks went deep and the light tones pushed toward pure white. The grain grew larger still. Sometimes it clumped together, and the clumps gave the prints a texture I found beautiful. The film, the chemistry, and the paper held far more range than I’d been asking of them.

That range came with risk. Once a roll went into that developer, there was no going back. It could come out ruined, or changed in ways I didn’t like, and the only way to find out was to develop it and see. Knowing the standard well let me step into that uncertainty on purpose, and navigating it became part of the creative work.

When the departure became the process

I paired that film with that developer, at that concentration, for years, refining the combination as I went. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a departure, and it stopped being creative work for me. It became how I shot and developed, as settled as the times and temperatures I’d learned at the start. When I mixed the developer, I was following my own type of standardization.

I didn’t notice the shift while it was happening. The first rolls I developed that way carried real uncertainty. Years later the same steps carried almost none, because what I knew about where they led had kept growing.

The parts of your work and what each asks for

Your work holds the same two kinds of element, often inside a single piece. A painting might start from a process you’ve used many times. Then there’s the part none of that structure can decide for you: what this particular painting is reaching for.

What decides how to approach each part is your intention for it. When the intention involves exploring something new, at least new to you, that part is creative work. You try things, watch what happens, and accept that you can’t fully know how it will turn out until you’ve made it. When the intention is to move known processes forward efficiently, standardizing is the right call. You use what you already know works, and your attention stays free for the parts that need it. Both approaches serve the work, and a single piece often needs some of each.

The creative elements launch from the standardized ones.

Where the next departure starts

Once that combination of film and developer settled into my process, it joined the thousands of standard rolls as part of what I knew. Whatever I tried next would start from there, the same way the first departure had grown out of the standard. The creative work kept moving a step ahead of me, and each departure that settled gave me somewhere new to step from.

Your work has its own version of this. A color mix you found by accident that your hand reaches for without asking. A way of opening a lesson that you worked out through trial and error and now use every time. Those parts once felt creative, and now they feel standard. Nothing has gone out of them. They’ve become the ground your next creative work stands on.

When I look at those prints now, I see the departure and the standard in the same grain.

Until next week, may the parts you know well carry you somewhere new.

Jeff