Film Star

posted by Nadine/Scarbiedoll

Oh you people with your fancy Canon D70s and your professional Flickr accounts. Say hello to your granddaddy, the 35mm SLR.

I love film. Oh sure, I took this photo with digital because I don't feel like waiting for processing and then having to scan. Admittedly, film is slow. But there is a magic to film that is lost now with the point-shoot-download immediacy of digital cameras.

Remember going on your European backpacking/Spring Break/weekend at the cabin trip and coming back with eight rolls of film? Remember the anticipation as you and your buddies waited impatiently to see how they would turn out? Looking at your pictures was a night to itself. You all crowded 'round the envelopes, reliving that too-touchy waiter in Acapulco, the scary bugs in Algonquin and holy fuck, these pics of Amsterdam make no sense!

Then they carefully went into an album or scrapbook, a labour intensive, but soothing and ultimately definitive act. How you stored your photographs said a lot about who you were. Even more telling was whether you dabbled in black and white, whether you chose glossy or matte, borders or raw edges.

We bought this Pentax on April 10, 2004. It was my husband's birthday and we had taken a long walk through Toronto from Trinity Bellwoods Park to St. Lawrence Market, snapping pics with our then-fave film camera, the Holga, which takes 120 film and has negatives the size of small Norwegian towns. (This was preceded by several point and shoot Lomo varieties that did not survive our rough-handling.) It was the most beautiful Toronto day, with spring on the cusp, before the tourists and the buses take over, full of loving each other and our fair city.

After buying lobster tails at the market, we ended up in a used camera store, talking to an old guy for whom old cameras were the raison d'etre. He showed us a few cameras withing the budget of what I wanted to spend on a J's birthday gift. We fell in love with the Pentax. Camera Dude threw in a wide-angle lens, a telephoto lens, a non-matching strap and a carrying case. The whole thing was less than $200 including tax.

We went home to our cute pre-kid apartment that night, giddy from the purchase. We BBQ-ed lobster with chilies and butter for dinner and cracked open the bottle of vintage (bien sur!) Dom P someone had given us as a wedding gift years earlier to celebrate the 31 years of my husband's existence on this planet -- and our newest second hand baby.

By the time we got the pictures from the developer three weeks later, I was pukey and exhausted. Turns out we'd created a "brand new" baby that night.

Comments

[debbie]

What a twist - I so didn't see that coming. The photos are so good I was all caught up in their glory before I realized you had just told a poignant tale, and beautifully so.