A year of film

At the start of this year I put my phone camera away for anything I cared about, and used an old 35mm rangefinder instead. Thirty-six frames per roll. No screen on the back.

I shot eleven rolls in twelve months. That is fewer than four hundred photographs, which is roughly what I used to take on a single holiday.

The biggest change was not the look of the pictures. It was the moment before pressing the shutter. With film I ask myself whether this is really worth one of the thirty-six. Usually it is not, and I just look.

About a third of the frames are failures: wrong exposure, missed focus, a thumb in the corner. I keep them anyway. They are an honest record of what I was trying to see.

I wrote a small script to lay the scans out as contact sheets, because looking at them in a grid, in order, is how I remember the year. There is a lot of the same street, the same window, the same tree. I did not notice that while I was taking them.

Next year: fewer rolls, I think. And a cheaper lab.