one year ago / canon rebel & expired Kodak Gold

El Capitan Canyon | Santa Barbara, CA
June 2012

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One year ago I made the decision to use film for my personal work and family photos. I picked up the only film camera I had on hand (a 90’s Canon Rebel) and in the same bag found ten rolls of Kodak Gold 400. So that’s what I used on my first foray back to the medium from whence I came. And this is the first time I used it. Getting these scans back was like getting an email from your best friend from sixth grade, the one you haven’t talked to in fifteen years, but who stills feels like the peanut butter to your jelly, the sun to your sky. Like, “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?!” And, “WHY DID WE EVER FALL OUT OF TOUCH?!”

I didn’t know this at the time, but with expired film you actually need to overexpose, and I didn’t. So a lot of these are underexposed and grainy, but I’m okay with that. Because that’s the deal with film, you get what you get. You get what you get.

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I have an elderly Aunt and Uncle who are in the process of cleaning out their home and giving things away. Things they have had tucked away in their cupboards and garage for thirty or forty years. Last Thanksgiving, Uncle Leonard brought a Nikon One-Touch to my mom’s house, thinking “one of us kids” might like it. It was perfectly timed, because after six months of use, my Canon Rebel had begun breaking down. I was having trouble locking focus and the battery door insisted on popping open, batteries falling out and camera rendered useless at the most inopportune moments, so I was ecstatic to have another option fall into my lap. One with sentiment attached, even better. It’s entirely possible that the camera had recorded me, as a child, and I like the notion of that.

So, for the first half of this year, I have used the Nikon One-Touch as my main form of documenting my children and my life. This point and shoot camera (like all point and shoot cameras) has given me freedom from technical thought, which is what the iPhone camera also brings to the table, and what I mean is – I don’t have to think about exposure. I only have to look, see, and then push a button. In certain aspects of my personal and family work, I appreciate the speed and ease this camera offers me. The images themselves feel so cut directly from the moment, like there’s nothing in between you when you see them in front of you. It’s exactly what was in front of me, nothing more and nothing less. No shallow depth of field to manipulate the viewer’s eye into being drawn to a certain place, no fancy bells and whistles.

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I recently picked up a Canon EOS 3, a film SLR. Which I wanted for the entirely opposite reason that I have come to appreciate in the Nikon One-Touch. I want to have some control. I want some depth of field. I want a little more quality and depth to the images. I haven’t run any film through it yet, but I’m getting ready to.

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Here’s a link to the “film” blog category I created to keep everything organized in one place.

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Happy Friday.