Taylor Wessing winners show film is far from dead

^{Picture credit: Spencer Murphy}

Spencer Murphy, 35, last night scooped the £12,000 prize with a photograph of jockey Katie Walsh, captured as part of Channel Four’s The Original Extreme Sport campaign.

Murphy said: ‘I chose to shoot the series on large format film, to give the images a depth and timelessness that I think would have been hard to achieve on a digital camera.’

This was a view echoed by London-born photographer Jooney Woodward who, two years ago, hit the Taylor Wessing jackpot with a portrait captured using a Mamiya RZ medium-format camera.

Woodward said at the time: ‘I prefer the quality and depth you get from using film – unfortunately, it’s a dying art. I don’t mess around with Photoshop, so what you see is what you get.’

And in 2009, Paul Floyd Blake won with a large format film camera – complete with bellows.