Film Photography

I got back onto social media for a little while to share some of my film photography, but I have learned that I don't do social media very well. Since I became pregnant with Brenden and his birth, I feel like I've changed and become a little more anxious and less confident in a way. Or maybe it's just less trusting? I don't know exactly what it is, but I know that I didn't like how often I was on Instagram and the other social medias and how I would agonize over every single word I wrote and how it would be received. I don't really want to be like that, and I'd like to feel confident again and just start posting, but I haven't quite figured out yet how to make social media a tool for me rather than becoming a tool for the app myself. Not since I laid down my business, anyway.

Yes, it's true. I've laid down the birth services business. It's not the right season for me. I may pick it up again someday in the future, but right now, I want to be home with my children, running around to soccer games and ballet practices. Although right now, it feels a little less "run-around-y" since my oldest four are in school and it's just me and Brenden at home. It's been kind of nice, but I miss my kiddos and the structure/routine of our summers - I know that sounds crazy, but I ran a pretty tight ship this summer!

In case you're interested, this is how. I'm rather proud of it!

Anyway, back to film photography. I got a Nikon F2 in January 2023 because my sister-in-law has one and has taken some really beautiful photos with it. I thought that was super cool and decided that if I could take photos with a mechanical camera like that and get good images with a finite number of exposures available, then I would prove to myself that I'm a really good photographer! Well, let me tell you something... I have learned more than once that I am not a really good photographer. There is nothing quite so humbling as getting images back from the lab like these:

And then there was the time that I *thought* I had loaded film into my camera and went hiking up Sentinel Dome - one of the most incredibly scenic places in the world, in my opinion - and realizing that I had left all my film back at the cabin, and had not loaded any into my camera. I vowed that would never again, and it hasn't, but I did load it incorrectly once which lead to basically the same thing when we were visiting a cute dairy farm in Maryland. I think that time was even more painful because I had been painstakingly taken notes on every single exposure the whole day. It still hurts when I think about it.

But then you get some like these: