Photo Notes #2
North Vancouver
There it is rolling around the drawer where I keep those small things that can get so easily lost. I’d bought a cutlery drawer organiser to help separate cables from getting tangled, scalpel blades from stabbing the post-it notes and where all my pens have a place to stay and not disappear into the depths of our house.
But there it sat. For ages. A forgotten roll of film. A finished, exposed roll of Kodak Ektar 100 with no notes anywhere, not on my phone, not in a notebook, nothing to helpfully tell me what, in thirty-six exposures, I had photographed with my Nikon FM3a.
I told myself it would be a waste of money to get it processed. What was on it anyway? I'd forgotten so it didn't matter. Eventually, I sent it away to the lab along with a few other rolls of film I had taken more care of, note-wise.
A week or so later, I downloaded the scans and looked at them through a worried squint. If I half closed my eyes, I thought, I wouldn't be too devastated if this particular set of photographs were rubbish.
But. A surprise. The pictures weren't so bad after all. There were even some I liked. A memory came back to me of walking on a warm, sunny day taking pictures of the sky, flowers, fences, cracks in the pavement and shadows on the ground. Occasionally, the focus was a little soft here and there. Manual focus takes practice. Sometimes, it's less about good eyesight and more about a feeling.
The exposure was pretty good despite the slow speed of the film. Usually, I choose a higher-speed film. I need the speed as I shoot holding all my cameras in my hand rather than fixing them to a tripod.
The light meter in this 20-year-old camera is still operating efficiently, judging by my pictures. Sometimes, I think I should show my camera some love and get it serviced, but the company I emailed never got back to me.
There are some pictures from my home — of the cat lying in the sun and some empty glasses reflecting the light and falling shadows across the counter next to the sink. My pictures, for a long time, have been about the small things that make up a day, those days that make up a life; shadows shimmering on a wall, an accidental still-life of plates and glasses, sharp lines of sunlight that cut across the floor, all those moments I photographed on my forgotten roll of film.
All photography by Tanya Clarke 2023
