Reference Points: Denai Moore

In this week’s Reference Points, we talk to up and coming soulstress Denai Moore about what inspires her musicality and personality, outside of the world of music. In her case, it’s a love of film photography.

In the past few years I’ve really developed a love for film photography. Shooting film is an incredible experience as a photographer and it excites me a lot more than signal photography. Film to me has a really unique quality to it, from the wide varieties of analogue cameras that are available, to the different types of film and just the process of developing film. My journey with film photography really started a few years ago with a fisheye camera that I got from lomography.com after I had developed an obsession with looking at pictures online which other photographers had taken with fisheye cameras. Now I own three film cameras and a polaroid which I have been using everywhere I go in the last few months of this year.

I love the tangibility of film.

Technology has allowed us to do everything digitally now. Using film cameras is a very hands on and manual process, from loading the film, shooting it, unloading the film and then developing, processing and scanning it. It’s a really fulfilling process.Everything is done with your hands.

I love the essence of film.

It requires a lot of patience which gives you room for anticipation. Film offers an element of surprise, and sometimes even disappointment. This is because of the limitations of film, you can’t really edit something you’ve just shot. So I like not really knowing what or how it will turn out when its developed. These special aesthetics make film photography far more gratifying.

I simply just love the look of film.

I love the imperfections that it gives you. Light leaks, dusts, grains, scratches – sometimes unintentional, make it unique and different from digital photography. You make beautiful mistakes when shooting with film.

I love the unique colour spectrum of film photography.

The colours are very unique when using film photography. I think that explains the popularity of apps like Instagram that allow you to give your everyday photos that you take on your phone a “vintage” feel. You can decide which colours you like before shooting, as there are a wide variety of different types of film that gives you these unique effects. So far I’ve only used black and white film. However there are lots of different types of film that I’d like to use/ experiment with, like XPro Slide film and Redscale film.

I love how film preserves memories.

Having physical photos that you can frame or just keep in a folder – which is what I do whenever I take a polaroid picture.

Included below are some hand-picked photographs that Denai counts amongst her favourites:

The Lake EP is out now – for more information, and to hear Denai’s music, head to her Soundcloud page.