I’ve started working on a little informal film project this year, and for that, I had to clear out the remnants of film that were lurking around the house, left in cameras and generally half-used and long-forgotten. This isn’t a post about this new project (yet – have to see if it actually comes into some kind of fruition). It’s about those last little bits of film. It’s not so unlike Maite’s potato tree, only kind of in reverse. Her trick would actually save me from this little guessing game. I often have a roll of film that I use a good bit of that gets left in the camera with just a few shots left on it. I find myself waiting for just the right event or subject to finish the roll on, and when those don’t come along, the roll just keeps on sitting there. Do you do this? I hope I’m not alone!

Like I said, I needed the cameras, I needed to know what kind of film I was going to be working with, and so I finished up whatever it was that was in those bodies and sent them off to be developed and scanned. Then began the impatient waiting to get them back. A few were not terribly surprising. Bits and pieces of this past spring and summer, riding trikes, parts of the garden, the like. I had also finished off a couple of things on our new little one.

Black and white: Tri-X 400 on an Olympus OM-1 | Color: Portra 400 on a Canon AE-1

The real gem for me was in a roll of Ilford HP5 400 film, I’m guessing shot with the Canon AE-1. It had images on it from a trip we took to Colorado and Utah in the summer of 2013 (Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Canyonlands National Park pictured below), from the Custer State Park Bison round up in that same year, and a few shots of our oldest in his first few newborn months in the spring and summer of 2014.

They’re all things I hadn’t forgotten about, but certainly weren’t in the fore of my memory lately. It was such a joy to have these show up – light leaks and all – as a brief and unexpected trip through the past.

Alison