(GPOMCT)
The summer after my freshman year of college, I took a b&w film photography and darkroom class. I felt super cool carrying my mom’s 30-year-old Canon AE-1 with me everywhere, lining up photos of things I thought were artsy. I don’t know if it was the film I used, or the less-than-great teacher, or the summer fling I was completely distracted with at the time, or if I just really wasn’t that good at it (the latter was most likely the case), but it all felt insanely difficult and at the end of the semester I had a bunch of useless contact sheets and some half-decent prints of half-interesting things. I gave away my leftover solutions and paper and developing container, and thought, well, that’s that.
But now I’m here trying to teach myself how photography works, the relationships between aperture and shutter speed and light, and I know it’s not rocket science but it’s hard to grasp when you’re used to permanently shooting in AUTO. So this summer I found an old Minolta 35mm for cheap, figuring it would help me understand. I quickly blew through four or five rolls just trying to load it correctly. And then of course, there were the times I *thought* I had the film in just right and spent a week carefully shooting this or that, only to pick up yet another blank roll from the photo lab. Every time, the guy behind the counter would shake his head a little while handing me an envelope of blank brown developed film. I mean, come on. It was getting embarrassing.
But then this very sweet gal I knew for about 30 seconds in Traverse City shared a very sweet note with me about how to successfully load a camera, as well as a few other tips, and this week I got my first b&w roll back from the lab and maybe one or two of the photos came out the way I had hoped and it was like winning a prize. Remember when all we had was film, and it was so exciting to flip through the pictures in the parking lot of the camera shop? A forgotten thrill, let me tell you.
I’m excited to see where it goes, now that I’m in a different chapter of my life, with decidedly less distractions and more time to be thoughtful. And. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I might be almost confident enough to soon graduate beyond photos of inanimate objects and sleeping cats. We’ll see.
