We laughed for a while about the special parking spot for “employee of the quarter.” Do you suppose that “employee of the month” seemed a bit too easy and “employee of the year” was perhaps too much to expect?

We stood beneath the trees and watched the leaves swirl and twirl and fall to the ground. I fiddled with the camera settings trying to figure out how to stop motion. Or maybe motion blur would be better. In the end, I just took pictures and hoped.

We walked through the farmers’ market admiring fresh produce. We didn’t buy anything because inflation has us pinching our pennies.

Many days are simple and ordinary. We will share supper with my mother-in-law, figure out the Wordle for today, and finish the books that are due back to the library this week. I decide that mindfulness is my kind of meditation.

The Light of the World

In Laura Pashby’s Small Stories today, she writes about “fog alerts.” Her dearest friends and family know her well and care about what she cares about. They understand her love for photographing fog, and when they see the fog roll in, they send texts to alert her.

I wonder what type of love language this is . . . when someone knows you deeply, when someone gets you without judgment, when someone jumps in beside you even if it’s not their thing, when someone bears witness to the way you see the world.

I have friends like this. They call or send texts to say I thought of you when I saw this place and I knew you would love to make pictures here.

I have made a lot of mistakes in my journey to learn film photography. In fact, I typically label my rolls, Trial & Error, and number them chronologically.

I’ve accidentally taken an entire roll of film when there was no film in the camera.

I’ve mailed a roll of 120 film to be developed only to discover that I had loaded the film backwards.

I had several rolls of film that had x-ray fog, likely due to sitting in high humidity during the summer in a slow moving mail truck or hot warehouse or other supply chain horror story.

Today, I got a call from the lab and the conversation began with, “We’re sorry, but . . . “ The film was inadvertently left in the developer too long (like 15 minutes too long). This is a mistake you can’t undo. It makes for very dense negatives and wild scans with high saturation and high contrast. I know this because the scans look like Halloween hipstamatic nightmares.

With all of this unpredictability, and the relatively low success rate, you might imagine I would give up and devote myself to the familiar and friendly territory of my digital camera. But for some reason I cannot fathom, I am not discouraged. In fact, I laughed today when the person from the film lab called. They were really good about owning their mistake and making it right with a refund and free film. They offered a free zoom call for my next roll to talk over any questions I might have and told me my work was good, really good, and maybe it was time to stop labeling every roll Trial & Error. (Of course, this may have just been flattery intended to soften the blow of their mistake. And if it was, I don’t care. It still felt good.)

I played with the scans this evening and most are simply not salvageable. There were three or four that might have been really good had they been developed properly, but I let that go. I was able to convert a few to black and white and put them down next to a few of my recent digital images and feel happy they had a home.

What’s that old adage? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.