reflective snaps

There’s been lots of shifting as of late. I redid the Fluffyland shop, which required all sorts of shifting of files; I repainted my room, which led to the shifting and re-shifting of my earthly possessions; and I saw the end of Lent, which caused me to shift back into the habit of eating sweet things, although hopefully with more restraint.

Lifestyle changes, scenery changes; sometimes we let them all happen, and sometimes we cause them ourselves. Lately I’ve been antsy with my life, and I’ve been doing all this shifting to try and change things. It’s worked, I suppose – things have changed. But I haven’t. Not enough.

A few nights ago as I sat, exasperated, in my discombobulated room, I found the pile of my photography projects. Projects. Like they could possibly be called projects. Let’s restart.

A few nights ago as I sat, exasperated, in my discombobulated room, I found a stack of black & white photographic prints. 8½ × 11, developed in a darkroom on high quality fiber paper and then matted to 11 × 14 matboard. There we go.

And it’s been over a year since I’ve developed prints in a darkroom. It’s such an amazing process… letting your eyes adjust, focusing to the tiny grains of the negative, and finally watching your image gradually appear in the bath. There’s nothing like it. I have 14 of these prints, representing an entire semester’s worth of work. They’re one of a kind. They took forever. And they mean the world to me.

Scanning them in and viewing them on the digital screen completely ruins them. I love the way they look in person, the way the fiber paper plays up the textures to make them larger than life. I can’t wait to frame these and hang them on my wall and finally do them justice. I hope with all my heart I get to make more someday.

Despite the fact that these are digital scans, and I’ve hardly retouched them, here’s a sampling. I don’t know if I can convey the power of working with black & white film with just the images… but maybe my words have made up for it.

This is also just a sampling, and as any good sampling.. I’m not including the best ones yet. So stay tuned.

So now, of course, the shifting will continue. But I will let myself change with each shift. It’s time to act like the person I want to become. And that person takes a heck of a lot more pictures than this person has been taking lately. She also gets a lot more joy out of the little things. I’ll get there.

(p.s. each image is clickable if you’d like to see it larger.)