Twelve Hundred in Twenty - Part One

I've been thinking about ratios a lot recently. Work versus reward and whatnot. I was born at the end of an era; when film was still how people took pictures. My mother had this old Kodak 110 camera that I remember using when I was a kid. It flipped open and made a very distinct sound when you pushed the little plastic square to take a photograph. And the rolls of film themselves looked rather weird, if I remember correctly. It was an entry point, but also an end. I think I owned one other film camera that wasn't disposable - an old Olympus that my father gave me for Christmas. After that it all went to hell.

My first digital camera was bright yellow, cost $99 and shot only eight images at a time. A few years later I upgraded to a point-and-shoot with single digit megapixels, followed by another with even more megapixels (!), and then my first DSLR sometime in the early 2000's. The ability to take hundreds of photos with no consequence - to shoot, adjust, and then shoot some more was appealing. And easy.

So for the last decade I have shot almost exclusively with some kind of digital image capturing device. A few years ago, however, my uncle gave me a 35mm Pentax K1000 camera that had belonged to my grandmother. It looked cool. The way I'd imagined cameras in my mind - hanging around some photo journalists neck in a war-torn country on the other side of the earth. So it sat on my bookshelf as an ornament of sorts, something that made me feel like a photographer. What a bunch of bullshit. But then maybe a month ago I picked it up, processed the roll of film that had sat inside for seven years, loaded a fresh one and turned down a road I may never return from.

All of that to say, when Kyra and I decided to depart on a three week motorcycle adventure which took us from Seattle to Portland, Pacific City to Astoria, Neah Bay to Lummi Island and then back to Seattle, the only thing I brought with me was five rolls of film. The fist half of the photos I managed to shoot while we were away can be seen below.

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