1128

Tonight I did some long-overdue tidying up around the house and came across a lot of my old prints (from film — you all remember what film is, right?). Of all of the film that I shot and printed before moving to digital (a bit more fully than I anticipated), the photo above is perhaps my favorite of all. It’s of Tony and Mary, two kids who used to dance at Tasty World in Athens. They were a fixture there when I was going - driving from Atlanta on Tuesday nights - in the 2001-2002 timeframe, and had probably been there for several years before that. A print like this - no two are the same, of course - hangs in my living room.

Velvia. Although this hardly pops like the slide does, and the slide is about 10% of the size at which I’ve reproduced it here. Taken sometime in 2002 at Jones Bridge Park in the Peachtree Corners area.

Putting sheets of slides on the lightbox, I began to long to take photographs like these today. I don’t know if I was somehow better then, if I tried harder (digital lets you get sloppy), or if it’s the latter combined with the peripheral memories that these photographs invoke.

Another favorite, although perhaps only to me, taken in Scotland in 2001. Scott is prepping his shoes for a walk in Edinburgh, while my dad pokes his head in the door of our B&B, undoubtedly to check on what might be keeping my mom, who is undoubtedly already hustling as much as she can: “All right, all right.”

I’m very pleased with these three, along with many others from that same time period - when I really began to get photography - and I begin to think that perhaps I should return to film. As I find more and more recent uncut medium format Velvia, however, I notice that most of the film photographs I can find from up to a year or two ago or so are pretty much terrible. Poorly-exposed, ill-composed junk. Where did that photographer of the turn of the century go?

Some of it has to do with the medium. A success on film (on slide film in particular) is something to be proud of. A success in digital comes with tweaking of levels and (recently) boosting the pop factor with gradient overlays and sharpening and re-tweaking of levels and on and on. It’s pleasing to me to have a success on film, but only in a limited way — film is very difficult to share (show off) - you have to print it yourself if you want it to look right (very difficult with color, time-consuming with b&w), not to mention scanning the print for electronic sharing (nearly impossible to get it right), whereas sharing digital is as simple as a file upload.

I could go on. Perhaps most of all I miss the spirit of those earlier photographs. When I brought my Vivitar S4000 (pre-loaded with Kodak Tri-X, a spare roll in my bag) with me to lunch at Felini’s with Morris and photographed a dog peeking in from the parking lot, or the policeman collecting donations in a boot on Howell Mill. Nowadays the camera comes to more obvious photo-taking destinations, but it’s along for the ride. In the early days I was more likely to go somewhere for the express purpose of taking photographs. Sounds like a good project for this weekend.

Posted: Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 12:46 am; Category: 1128; Comments feed: RSS 2.0.
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