To start things off, I have a few shots from back when I first dug this camera out of my mother's closet. I was in my second year of high school at the time, and taking a dark room photography class for the fun of it.
This is a scan of one of those very first photos. It's a shot of a Chinatown lamp in San Francisco, California. The image is black and white (thought I admit the scan looks very sepia) with red oil pastel painted over the lanterns and yellow over the glass panels of the lamp. I had no clue what I was doing, but this is still probably one of my favorite pictures.
I have a few more from that trip to San Francisco. It was a special trip my mother and I took. We stayed over Labor Day weekend, enjoying the city. We visited Chinatown, Japantown, Pier 39, Muir Wood, and so many other places. We walked along the beach and saw dolphins playing in the waves. We rode the trolley car and ate breakfast at a French restaurant. Of all the film photos I took on that vacation, very few of them turned out.
The shot of the French restaurant is the only clear photo from the role of color film.
Most of them look like this:
Washed out colors, awkward angels, and blurry images are the traits of the vast majority of my early shots. I am no stranger to the camera. I own a regular Canon G10 that I take most of my pictures on. I understand lighting, angle, and focus. Yet the rules taught to me in art classes, film classes, and in my every day life that work perfectly well with my digital camera, are so much harder to master when all I have is a viewfinder and a light meter. My range of focus and vision becomes more more limited and suddenly I'm thinking about the photo in a whole new way.
I admit it now: For me, there is an unmistakable romance in film photography that does not exist in digital media. There is something about it that is much more intimate and personal. There is no point and click. There is a understanding between you and the camera and the image you are trying to capture. There is a beautiful mystery in the science of it: the light moving through the lens and reacting with the film in a way that preserves and entire scene.
The purpose then, I suppose, of this blog is to share with others my love of film photography. I want to share my most interesting adventures in this world with you through my 35mm lens.
So sit back and enjoy! Because this world is a beautiful place and film is a beautiful way to express it!
