Old School Sunday

The life and love of a dog is timeless and pure and simple. What if we all learned to live that way again?

This image started out this morning as an unexposed frame on a roll of Kodak 400 ISO black & white film loaded in a 1980 Nikon F3HP, the first Nikon I ever owned. It was shot with a Nikkor 50mm lens at f1.8. Bravo was peaking through a partially opened door into a dark hallway as he was bathed in the natural light of our master bathroom. By 1pm, I had the film awash in developer and by 6pm the negative had been scanned into my hard-drive. I was tempted to crop or play with the image in a digital light room (out of habit?) but I resisted the urge. What you see here is directly from the negative.

I have shot film for a meaningful part of this past week(after a 20+ year hiatus) and I have fallen in love again with the process and the wonderment of producing analog images. There is something simply "old world surreal" about confining yourself to only 36 exposures a day and having no idea how the images will look until the images are developed and the film is blown dry. The imperfect light metering, the entirely manual exposure settings, the all-important question of EV, the chemical process; all of this seems so obscure in the digital age that I found it incredibly rewarding to return to a more mystical time. It is photography the way it was when I first became hooked on it. Surely digital photography involves less work and less expense. Yet, I think how often we try to process a digital image to "look like film" and I have concluded (at least in my hands and with my digital skills) this is nearly an impossible feat. I am quite fond of the real look of film and I plan on doing the analog image process all in one day more often but, surely, it will not be an everyday nor even weakly thing (and I doubt that I will use this choice of film again). I cannot even muster a digital image with any frequency.

But analog photography experiment was not the only old world part of the day. As the film was drying, I listened to vinyl records on an old tubed stereo. The television and the Apple notebook both remained dark the entire day. But, the file of my father's letters that were written to me over the years was cracked open. I made it through five of the fifty or so letters and, then, I had to stop. I was emotionally drained but ever thankful to be his son. As I read the words he wrote, I could hear his elegant voice and envision his gold Cross Townsend ballpoint positioned perfectly in his slender but weathered hands, as he penned in his nearly perfect handwriting compositions that still take my breath away and places my heart firmly in my throat. Oh my, that man could write.

I went back in time today and wanted to stay there. I will try to return to the past again quite soon for this was an incredible day.

The last few weeks were incredibly productive for me so I hope to have a bit of Blipfoto time this week.