I am David Schmid, a photographer based in Switzerland. I started photographing in the 1980s, when film was simply how photographs were made. There was no other way to learn it: you metered carefully, you waited for the lab, and you found out what you had done only once the negatives came back. Many of the emulsions catalogued on this site are ones I used at the time, some of them long discontinued.
When film declined, I moved to digital like almost everyone else. It taught me a great deal, but something kept pulling me back. For several years now I have worked almost exclusively on film again—35mm and medium format, colour and black-and-white—not out of nostalgia, but because the material behaves in ways I find worth the trouble.
That interest turned into the film database on this site. Analog film today is a tangle of rebrands, respools and repurposed cine stock, and it is often unclear what is actually inside a given cassette. I try to establish what is, working from manufacturer datasheets, correspondence with the companies themselves, and — where it helps — the memory of having shot the stuff.
The photographs are the other half. The films are the tools; this is what they make.
Contact: hello@emulsiondex.com