New Roll / On Cheap Good Film And Freedom From Guilt (Patreon)

Hello!

I saw a massive influx of new subscribers, and I deeply appreciate it. I am very grateful I can keep shooting film while I figure out what the hell I'm doing with my life, because it's therapeutic for me in a way that basically nothing else is. Allow me to roundaboutedly explain why.

Before I start yappin': Here's the zipped folder of all on this roll. Here's the Flickr gallery for perusing and individual photo downloads.

This roll is "Fuji" 400 (reboxed Kodak, more on that in this post) shot through my Nikon N60. I'll be shooting a lot of rolls of this stuff in the near future because it's wickedly cheap right now and I grabbed a bunch before the new Kodak price increases cause it to get expensive.

I've found my film drawer to be a lot like the rest of the fridge: it feels psychologically reassuring when it's full, even though I can't eat all the food or shoot all the rolls at once.

This roll is pretty typical for what I use this cheap-but-good film for, especially in the extremely casual-amateur N60: a little of everything. This is a more-typical-for-me shot of one of my favorite parts of the Seattle skyline, Smith Tower.

Since the N60 has an in-body flash and the film is relatively cheap, I'll sometimes use it for casual candid portraits with a fill light, like I did here with this shot of Antigone. This was during a photowalk I organized for some friends a few weeks back.

ISO 400 is usually just fast enough for me to get away with indoor shots, if I use a sufficiently quick lens. This was with my Nikkor AF-D F2.0 35mm at something like 1/20th a second, which is the lower end of what I'll handhold. It's still kind of a crapshoot - I took a few this slow that came out blurred - but I'm willing to chance it since the film isn't 90 cents per exposure.

There's also a bunch of weird shots I usually wouldn't try, like this one of a man cleaning the Seattle Public Library, which is too minimalist and low-color for my normal style.

This is the allure of this stuff: It helps punch through the Calvinist, Protestant-like guilt ingrained into my marrow about everything I do and am, and I take more photos with less anxiety. Those of you that have followed me for a while might remember that a bad film photo - and the sense of guilt about wasting the shot - was (one of) the final straw(s) in driving me to the psych ward last year.

Since the hospital I have tried to make progress on beating back this deep guilt and anxiety. I believe I've made some headway, but I wish the progress were linear, and it is not. I admit this society and its anti-trans rhetoric is making the guilt very present right now.

In these moments where it feels heavy and I wonder what I have done, I need ways to convince myself that no, I did not do anything deeply wrong. It's okay to burn a shot, it's okay to relax a little, it's okay to admit that I am imperfect.

Perfection will not cure the guilt, it will simply drive me more insane.

So I shoot this stuff that I can take less seriously, less perfectionist, and then I get the roll back and it's even more pleasant to look through than usual. It's not just "high art" that I intensely focused on. It strikes me like a record of my life for the past few weeks. The imperfections in the roll become easier to forgive, because the joys came from everywhere. I made mistakes and it was still good.

And because it's good film, the shots that I do believe are artistically important are still actually worth looking at. It's a very rewarding way to shoot. I hope I can keep myself in this groove.

Thanks for your support, as always.

Vicki