Themeless Thursday: in which I return from an absence, photographs in hand

I have trouble—obviously—sticking scrupulously to a blogging schedule. It’s always something: my camera broke; I was out of town; I have been trying to get back into the swing of living alone. But, here I am! For a couple of days, my outfit photos are going to appear very odd given the current climate of Iowa City. I had a few days’ worth of photos stored on my memory card—from when it was still seasonably cold—and I’d hate to see those go to waste.
In the past two weeks, I have finished two different rolls of film. One roll was a disposable camera that I have had for about a year and a half. I bought it from an antique shop, curious of the effect that the long expired film would have on the photos. I took a succession of photos of some of my favorite places in Austin back in January 2011, and then throughout the subsequent year I took some pictures of R, as well as R and I together. I dropped this roll off at Hyvee. When I picked it up on Tuesday, the woman working at the counter apologized, saying that the photographs were free of charge because the worker had tried to process my roll of film on a broken machine. As a result, about a fifth of the photos did not turn out, and appear only as a glowing blur of brown. And about a third of the remaining photos are almost too dark to make out. The rest all look as though taken in sepia, with a strange laser-like red line through the middle:



from last week, at Town Lake


on my birthday last year, playing Scrabble and drinking a margarita


R on my birthday last year


Hut's Hamburgers: my favorite ATX burger joint


Quack's: one of my favorite coffeeshops


Mother's: a fabulous vegetarian restaurant (this photo is from 2011, but we got lunch here on my birthday last week)

The second roll of film is the first from my new Diana Colette from R. I went to a camera store downtown to have them help me get the roll out, because I could not tell whether the roll was finished or not. The counter had long ceased to reflect the actual amount of exposures, and was counting backwards rather than forward, so I asked them to rewind the roll for me in order to avoid taking photos over photos that had already been taken (if that is possible). In addition, I discovered online that I might have been taking all of the photos wrong! Apparently, using the 35mm back to the camera, I ought to have been compensating for a disparate ratio regarding distance from the subject and the appearance of the subject through the lens.

Well, true enough. Most of the photos are iffy. Subjects are too close, and lighting is poor in almost every photo that I took indoors. I will try to scan a few examples next week or over the weekend.

In conclusion? I don’t have that many photos from my spring break. I used R’s digital camera a very little bit, but I do not have those photos yet.