Today’s prompt is to write a story about pictures on a roll of film, using 12, 24 or 36 paragraphs. I don’t know if that’s to find some old film and tell the story of each picture, or craft a narrative around or about or mentioning film.
I did just take a picture of film because meta or some other arty horseshit. I had actually failed to take a picture of the negative on the film, and did a focus stack instead. You can see above this time I managed… something.
This picture is of me at about 19. I have no idea where or when Bill the Cat got scratched into it, or if I’m just hallucinating that.
19 was the year I spent in Manitoba and Poland. I worked on a farm and at a daycare and for a snack food company, and did data entry in a language I don’t speak. I made some friends and broke many rules, and was the impetus for a few new rules. Sorry about that, future participants. 19 started with me 1000km from home and ended up with me enrolled at university before I’d technically graduated high school.
I honestly don’t remember the Bill the Cat in the original photo, though.
That trip was the height of my film-based photography, and close to the end. I kept snapping for a while afterwards but the dummy tax is pretty high on quick shots and paying for development and waiting for the photos to come back – it’s a pain in the ass, and I found it pretty discouraging. It was fun to get an envelope of doubles and trade photos with friends, but it’s significantly more fun to be able to post them for everyone online. –
In a similar vein to haiku or Twitter, I do understand how limitation can breed creativity. It forces focus, cuts the fat and adds directness to the expression.
But the reality is that photography is as much physical and technical as it is artistic and creative, which means you have to practice. With film, that got expensive and annoying, very quickly. Imagine trying to learn to write a novel while waiting a day before reading and paying 12 bucks every 36 pages whether they were good or not.
I subscribe to the shotgun school of photography. I shoot all the pictures. Some are out of focus. Many are off-frame. Sometimes I shoot 100 and use one photo. Sometimes I shoot 40 and use all 40 in a blend. That experimentation would have cost me dearly in the film days and would likely have meant not learning much about photography. –
Beckett said “ever tried. ever failed. no matter. try again. fail again. fail better”. Which is just fancy writing for try a lot, fail as much as necessary. If you can get your costs per try down, you’re just paying yourself, really.
But I am slightly hypocritical. Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” My multitudes are, for all my efforts, not internally consistent. When I played music, I played exclusively through tube amplifiers, refusing transistors and DSP in pursuit of tone. I played bass and I was never convinced the gear I was seeing was actually designed with/by a bass player, and not just the third-worst guitar played in the shop. Yes, that was a shot at The Beatles, because I’m excessively topical.
Sound may be analog but images and video will always be digital to me. The final nail in the coffin came when I spent the 4 hours necessary to scan all the physical photos from my exchange onto my computer. I looked at them on my laptop while I wrote this, but I honestly couldn’t tell you where the prints are now. Good thing this is the 12th paragraph so I don’t have to unpack THAT particular statement.
