Top of the morning to you all! I know, I’m quite enthusiastic for someone who got woken up by a group of passers-by on a Monday morning. My flat is on the second floor and my room is facing towards the pavement so I can hear everything that goes on around the building rather clearly and I do mean everything. Well, thank goodness for my morning coffee fix and this indie track that I can’t seem to stop listening to!
Anyway, the real aim of this post is not to digress into my supposedly lovely morning but to share with you all the results of my very first film roll that has been successfully processed and developed just yesterday, all thanks to Boots in Colchester Town. Honestly, I had no idea that Boots even had a photo-printing service at all. I simply thought that Boots was merely a pharmaceutical retailer but after that wonderful discovery considering that it was a Sunday and all of the studios were closed, I was beyond amazed at how convenient the retalier is.
My first experience of getting my roll processed and developed was a bit nerve-wrecking at first. I was thinking about how the photos were going to look like with the ISO and aperture settings that I used which I had merely learned from YouTube videos and guides online, and whether or not each and every one of the photos that I took would perfectly fit in their respective frames. My fears became real but only for some of the photos as the rest turned out way better than I expected, hence I was truly happy even though there were some not so badly defected photos which I could quickly fix on the laptop.
I requested for 6×4″ prints with white borders and scans of the prints on a CD to be done in an hour which costed me £7.99 altogether. If I were willing to wait to collect my photos the next day, it would’ve been £5.99 instead so it’s definitely much cheaper than the other studios that I contemplated of going to earlier. Despite the Boots employee who attended to me and she forgot to put white borders around my photos which meant that I had to wait for another hour (though I only ended up waiting for 15 minutes since she re-printed my photos immediately after I resounded my ‘distress’ of the missing borders for lack of a better word), the service was good nonetheless and the quality of the photos was commendable, so I am definitely going back to drop my film rolls there in the future! Besides, I got refunded for the whole thing.
And now… on with the photos!
Presenting to you my very first photo on an analogue camera:
… yeah, it was an epic fail, I swear. The lighting was scarce and the photo didn’t fit in the film frame as I thought. My worst fears of imperfection and defects all molded perfectly in a single shot. But hey, I tried not to take it hard on myself. It was my fault for being too eager to use the camera that I didn’t change the ISO meter.
Don’t worry, that’s not all there is to my first roll. There are more photos coming up some time this week and I thought that perhaps it might be better to upload the photos set by set.
Stay tuned and have a good week ahead!
The Rustic Trove 
I actually find the first few pictures not so bad! It sort of reminds me of the ‘Imperfect Issue’ from Kinfolk, not of the photography style because I haven’t read and seen it, but more on to the actual ‘theme’ of it. It’s imperfect thus beautiful in it’s own way. I especially have a soft spot for the second one. I guess the more time it takes for me to look and understand the picture, the more appreciative I felt of it’s flaws-that-are-not-actually-flaws-to-me. What am I even saying, haha. But anyways, that’s just a pence of my mind. I can’t choose a favourite picture but even while I’m writing this, I can still see the picture of that mason jar in my mind. Wonderful. I’m no photographer, thus I can’t describe how much I like your pictures in a better, shall I say it, professional way so I’m sorry for that. I love how the quality is sort of… gritty? If that was even a suitable word to use. And also the way the pictures bring a nostalgic, somber feeling, like a dull sadness throbbing under a peeling scab… or maybe that’s just an influence of the song. hahahah. Oh dear, this was longer than I expected. So anyways, like I said, I loved this. Truly.
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Thanks for dropping by and your insight!
Well it must have sounded as if I didn’t see any beauty in my first shot but I actually did – and truly do. In its imperfection it symbolically exemplifies my initial journey into analogue photography. One simply doesn’t begin to do something perfectly unless accorded to by beginner’s luck or by precision and, ‘unluckily of me’, none of this afforded me so but it didn’t necessarily make me resent my first shot. In fact it was hilarious. Hit me straight in my funny bone that my first shot was indeed beautiful and symbolical in its own fashion. đŸ™‚
Yes, the film roll that I used for these shots have a grainy quality to them. It was a big plus point to me, which was why I wanted a Lomo 800 roll as my first roll. Besides it’s quite affordable!
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