In Development: Adventures in Film, Volume 29

August 29, 2019August 29, 2019 by kyle In photography Leave a comment

If I’m going to start sharing again, these Throwback Thursday/In Development posts are going to get real throwback-y. I mean, one of the photos in this roll of film highlights a newspaper in a coffee shop that’s dissecting the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. I haven’t shared a film photo since Trump got elected. It might take a few Thursdays to catch up…

MP_2016_35mm_HP51600-661580020006 — Omaha, 2016

I was so pleasantly surprised to come across that simple image (though the memories of how I felt in the days after the election aren’t exactly pleasant). It’s a simple image. The light is nice and there’s some dimensionality produced by the window, but there’s not a ton of pop. The meaning comes from the personal memories that came flooding back about the 2016 election, my year in Omaha, that wonderful Beansmith coffee shop (now closed) where I listened to records and edited hundreds of photos.

So I guess that even though the photo doesn’t pop to the outside world and won’t do well on Instagram, it does have some pop to me.

I’ve gone back and forth about whether to shoot these kinds of nice-but-not-wow snapshot images on film. Part of what I love about film is that the cost and lack of immediate feedback forces me to slow down and be more deliberate. Unfortunately, thinking twice about taking a picture also discourages me from taking these kinds of shots. Most of the time, that’s probably a good decision. But I’m sure glad I didn’t listen to that hesitant voice in the back of my head on that morning in Beansmith in 2016.

All photos were taken with my Leica MP and Zeiss 35mm Biogon f/2.8 on Ilford HP5+ shot at ISO 1600 and pushed two stops in development. They were developed and scanned by The FIND Lab, and I adjusted contrast, the tonal curve, and clarity to most of the images in Lightroom.