One of the things that film photography gives you is the total surprise factor. Like when you find a film in your fridge that you thought you remembered taking pictures on but then weren’t quite sure. We were developing films yesterday as part of LoLo’s class 8 project and I found such a film lurking in the fridge. Actually, I thought it was the one on the scanner but, having developed it, I found that that one was actually an unused film. It will now be used to show people what an unused film looks like. And I was not at all annoyed at having wasted 25 minutes of my life developing nothing of any use.
But the film in the fridge was the one I had been looking for and I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of them were all right. Here are some of them. In the same way as I take the approach of knowing I will never be either first or last in a marathon, I am also happy that my photos will never be the best or worst out there. I would just like to get better over time.
I think there is something about black and white photos that gets the imagination going that colour photos don’t do in the same way. I don’t know if it’s an association with years gone by or something inherent in the simplicity of black and white or something completely different. But this photo started me thinking of what the story behind it is:
This one was about the texture of the bark and I wanted to see if it would work with the other trees out of focus. Next time I will stick to the texture of the bark. (And sorry about the dust and tiny hairs on the negative, they are an absolute pain to get rid of – what looks big here is probably less than a millimetre in real life!)
And, finally, a few to show that I will always return to my love of shapes. I think I like geometry when I was younger.
I do love my spiral staircases with random Berlin graffiti. Apart from the graffiti, it reminded me of the double helix shape:
And I was determined to get this one just to get the point of intersection. Unfortunately I also managed to get something in the top corner. I could probably Photoshop it out if I knew how to use Photoshop:
