Every so often, I drag out one or two of my old film cameras and make Kindra pose for pictures until I can tell that her patience is almost shot.
The cameras are awkward to focus, they take a while to adjust the exposure and you get only a dozen shots per roll of film.
I’ll send the film off to a place in California for processing, get them back in a few days and then realize: I could have gotten these pictures way cheaper and way quicker with a digital camera. Probably would be sharper pictures, too.
But hey. And I can’t believe I am actually writing this, but cheaper, quicker and better isn’t always the best.
Way back when the earth was young, I was a cub reporter at the newspaper in Ada. They sent us out armed with old twin lens reflex cameras that were pretty good boxes.
The cameras didn’t break, they had huge negatives that made it possible to crop pictures and still have crisp images and they didn’t require batteries.
I hesitate to guess how many frames I rolled through one of those cameras, but it was a lot.
And I did a lot of the darkroom work, developing the film and making prints.
Along with the film, I also developed a fondness for the old cameras, and I bought one of my own when I moved to another newspaper that didn’t use them.
In today’s world, digital photography has us cooking with gas instead of wood. This morning, for example, I took yonder digital Nikon to shoot a house fire and was able to have a photo ready to go in the paper within 10 minutes of being back in the office.
No question, digital is better.
But, dang it. I had some of the best times of my life shooting film through a manual twin lens camera with no light meter.
I was young, had thick black hair and flexible lower back muscles and couldn’t wait to taste the joys of each new day.
I still get a kick out of each new day, but the youth, the hair and the back muscles are merely memories of a bygone time.
But they are memories I can recapture for an hour or two by spooling a roll of film into one of my aging cameras and capturing the 2020s with a 1980s look.
As long as I can keep getting film, I’ll keep on doing it.