Hello!

So, we’re back. Actually, we got back home to Ohio last week, but there’s been a confluence of drama since then (some family stuff, some health-related stuff, and a good heap of drama with our camper – here’s a tip for you: don’t buy a Rockwood. Worst. Camper. Ever.). Anyway, it turns out I did pack a boatload of film that we didn’t wind up shooting, but not by much. I think we shot all but one or two rolls of the 20+ 620 film I had respooled, and quite a bit of the 127 film.

What I barely shot was any 35mm film. Even though I had a boatload of fun, weird 35mm films to use, even though I love my 35mm Nikon FM2N outfitted with the Lensbaby, I had to force myself to use it. I don’t know. The more photography stuff I do, the less I see the point of 35mm. I just like working with the larger format negatives so much more.

So, the cameras I did wind up using! The Polaroid 230:

The Yashicamat:

The Speed Graphic (Zarl!), of course.

The Savoy, although I haven’t uploaded any vacation photos from it yet, and, to a lesser extent, the Ward’s 26 127 camera, the Bollywood pinhole 4×5 camera, and Watson, the 5×7 camera.

All we’ve managed to develop so far is the black and white film. I accidentally fogged a chunk of our 4×5 black and white negatives (sad trombone), which kind of sucks, but things like that inevitably happen when you’re loading and unloading film on the fly. The majority of the film we’ve shot is process C-41, which we haven’t even started to develop yet.

After looking over the black and white negatives, though, I know one thing – if I had this vacation to do over again, I’d take less pictures of waterfalls.

I can’t help it. I don’t exactly live in waterfall country, so whenever I see one I instinctively take photos of it, which is fine, but seriously? I could have stepped back a bit from the waterfalls. Less waterfalls. More other things. I guess I took so many waterfall pictures that any pictures of other subjects, like this one:

…automatically stand out to me.

We were gone for a month, and it was easy to get in the habit of drive, drive, drive, get to a “Destination,” and stop and take pictures, automatically. The interesting pictures, the ones I’m drawn to now, are the ones we took not of a big major scenic Event, but of smaller things, like the awesomeness we ran across in Forks, Washington:

Or being so bored while doing about 18,000 loads of laundry that I brought the pinhole camera inside the laundromat and amused myself for a while:

We still have a boatload of film to develop from the trip, so we’ll keep slogging through the developing and the scanning. I’m looking forward to making prints already!