Trendy Film Dump
Did you hear?? Film is back! JK, it's just extremely trendy and popular again. Starting when I was a teenager I LOVED the ritual of filling up multiple rolls of film and rushing them to the grocery store/convenience store/camera shop to get them developed. Then, when I was in college and had access to developing photos myself I went overboard and it became an obsession. I've never been big on working in a darkroom but I loved processing my black and white film then going across the hall in the old PNCA building to scan all the negatives. I had a smooth workflow and produced dozens of awesome images every week. I was much more social then, lived in a busier city, and was more willing to dedicate a large percentage of my income to film than I do now. I still shoot film occasionally but now it's at a much slower pace. I will let random images accumulate on a roll for weeks or even years. Back in the day I would usually develop a roll within a day of shooting it so I knew what to expect. Now, I never really know what will be on a roll, what camera I used it in, what state I lived in when I shot it. This is also a fun way to work. Mystery and surprise are the key elements that drew me to photography and are what keep me going.
But...it's a crap shoot. I usually have a 35mm point & shoot in my camera bag when I'm working or traveling and more often than not I forget I have it. If I remember I will snap a couple of frames that will end up having a digital counterpoint that will be seen and processed well before I get around to seeing the film version. It will feel redundant. Sometimes, like with the image above, I will completely forget why I took the picture or where I took it.
I recently brought 4 rolls of Kodak Gold 400 (not my favorite) to Photosmith NH in Dover, New Hampshire. The rolls had been laying around for a long time, but I was really surprised to see PRE-PANDEMIC images mixed with some shots of the scary, early days of both the pandemic and my family's time in Maine. There are images of my last camping trips in Oregon, our last days at our old apartment, and sad signs of Covid-life in our new home state. I'll include some choice shots from the rolls and I'll try to provide some context in the captions.
These shots are from late 2019, they are from the last camping trip I went on with my go-to party camp friend and best man Mike Payne. Stupidly, I didn't take any pictures of Mr. Mike but I got some shots of our campgrounds and surrounding trails. This was in John Day, Oregon. It was a quiet and mellow camping trip. I remember that we slept a lot. We usually went on one camping trip a year and the year before was a little too wild so we wanted this trip to be quiet. We showed up, set up some hammocks and fell asleep. We woke up and went for a hike but didn't go far because we both agreed that the landscape was nice but very same-sie. Mike had recently visited Iceland said that the it was like John Day - "Nice but boring." I really regret not getting a picture of Mike. I should call him.
These shots are from my last long bike ride in Portland. Just funny Portland stuff. 2020.
These are some shots from our last few months in Portland. We really blew it by not using the pool more. 2019-20
Then things get a little bit heavier. We moved to Maine at the very beginning of March 2020 and the entire world shut down almost instantly after we arrived. I remember getting chills when they put up signs on Shore Road saying that no one was allowed on the beach. No one knew how to handle the new situation we were all in and people thought that they needed to tape up basketball hoops to prevent super-spreader pickup games. The rest of the pictures below were taken in the spring of 2020 and they are a little weird, a little off, but they definitely convey the feelings I was having at the time. RIP Nora the dog.
I have a week or two off from any photo assignments so I think for next week's newsletter I'll keep with the theme of film photography and I might do a trip down memory lane. I think that over the course of the next few months I'll post digest-versions of greatest hits from specific years. I think I'll start with 2008. I took a lot of goofy-ass photos that year. It'll be great.