Abstract No. 1

I am working my way through my negative scans in chronological order, moving them from Lightroom to printed contact sheets. And seeing so many of them together has been depressing. The images fall into three broad categories. 

A few of them are pictures of family and friends. The most important to me are group portraits I have taken of the family at Christmas for the last 50 years. But they only account for half a dozen pictures a year. And, all together, the family and friends pictures are fewer than 25 or so of my annual total of roughly 500 film photos. 

Some of the other images are pictures of interesting places we have visited. These are important to me too, but we travel so little that there are even fewer of them than the family and friends photos. 

The great majority of the images are pictures I took by picking up a camera already loaded with film then going out for a walk to look for pictures to take with it. And, sadly, if I have more that a dozen of these pictures worth printing in a year that’s a lot. 

I’ve decided to try something new. I started by taking the film out of all my cameras and developing the negatives. Except for one photo of my wife there were no pictures worth printing. I made contact sheets pf all the negatives. Then, for the first time in my life, I did not  put film back in any of my cameras. That was two weeks ago. I didn’t know where things would go from there. 

(I’ll say a word about the above photo in the next installment.)