Rediscovering 35mm
This Pentax ME camera sat unknown in its case for perhaps a year,
stacked with other items saved from a family storage unit. Complete with a set of lenses and a working light meter, it was still loaded with a half-used roll of film. I shot the second half on a sunny autumn afternoon and was reminded of that feeling - the shutter click, the hazy cinematic image in the viewfinder, the deferred pleasure of not knowing how the shot will turn out.
I took a few photo classes during high school at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and was not very good at it - mostly resulting in underexposed, blurry and grainy images. I remember a long-exposure shot of a friend waving his arms, blurring them back into a blank wall, a ghostly torso. My photo teacher spent hours touching up the print to remove dust flecks and scratches.
That roll left in the Pentax didn’t turn out, having been slowly exposed over the years, but I picked up some Fuji color film and started playing with backyard garden shots, photo walks around the neighborhood, and moments with friends in the woods. I don’t care for posed shots (“say cheese!”) or my computerphonecamera, so the 35mm process is a nice change of pace. Take the camera along for a journey, hold it up to my eye and sometimes click the shutter, hoping that we can forget the lens, stumble on spontaneous moments and real faces. Or frame organic textures, found objects and random discoveries.
Now, with a solid understanding of the exposure triangle (and a shutter-priority auto-exposure camera), I’m enjoying the process. It’s still just five bucks to develop a roll at Citizens Photo (one long strip of negative in a mylar sleeve, curled into a small paperboard box). For now I’m using a macro lens and LED lightbox attachment to take digital pictures of the negative, before inverting and color correcting on the computer. It’s a bit absurd, all in all.
But there’s a pleasure in creative pursuits without ambition. We should all have bands that only play parties, sketchbooks we share with just a few friends, or perhaps elaborate sculptural installations under the house, to be discovered after we die.
