For those who aren’t aware, I got a BFA in Photography what seems like eons ago… which means that I actually shot a good deal of photography on film. That clear stuff that had images on ’em, before digital photos. Remember that? yeah… probably not. I barely do.
As my previous post mentioned, it was Worldwide Pinhole Day, and even though one can put a pinhole lens on a digital camera, it just seemed wrong… kind of like watching a Milli Vanilli music video in Dolby 5.1… just not quite appropriate for the situation. So I resolved to bust out a film camera to appropriately capture the decisive moment. However, I was traveling that weekend, and had to travel via air. And apparently, asking to have your high-speed film hand-checked to avoild x-ray machine fogging, is an automatic ticket to a full TSA pat down, complete with swabbing inside the waistline of the jeans. I didn’t realize film was that offensive.
And what’s more surprising – or rather, disappointing – is that it’s near impossible to find a good place who will just develop a roll of film. Most drugstores either charge an arm and a leg or require you to buy a full set of prints – which I wasn’t really needing. I ended up begrudgingly heading to Wally World, where they promptly developed my film, complete with gobs of residual crap gummed up on the negatives, and about 50% of them with scratches.
So in summary, I wanted to remain true to traditional photography and shoot film – which left me with a rather uncomfortable TSA patdown and an expensively developed roll of negatives that may or may not be salvageable. Milli Vanilli in Dolby Surround isn’t sounding all that bad right now.
