{ Contact Sheet }  |  A.Case.Of.Nostalgia.


It was dark.
But not an ominous pitch black sort of darkness.
It was red-ish.  But the warm kind of red. The kind that envelopes your spirit in its hue.

I remember the prominent smell of the room.  The chemical baths.  First the exposure...then the process of dipping the photo paper into various buckets of chemicals.  Then, as if controlled by some divine force, vague ghostly images begin to appear. Slowly at first. Then within nanoseconds...abruptly...until the fullness of the familiar image is completely exposed.

It was magic.

Those were the film days. Days when I first fell in love with photography. Maybe it was the "magic." Maybe it was the process. Or maybe it was just the chemical smells I was addicted to. ;-)  Not quite sure what it was, but I did know that I fell in love with the whole process of "creation."

Fast forward to the 21st century.  This past week to be exact.  And I snapped this image: a printout of a "digital photobooth" that was set up at my neighbor's company party.  And in an instant...it took me back to my darkroom days.  It reminds me of a contact sheet, or "contact print" as it was also called.  But when I snapped this image I realized that it is very much different than a contact sheet. Gone is the magical process of creation. All that stuff is hidden in the background now...in some digital universe of zeroes and ones.  Don't get me wrong...I embrace the whole digital photography revolution and all, but deep down inside of me...I long for Princess and her generation to know what it was like back then...in the analog era, when everything was handcrafted, one stop-bath at a time.

Maybe that's why I love my X-gears. They harken and take me back to a part of me that connects with the-days-of-old. Maybe that's why there is a soulful connection between us. And reminded me that in the end, I'm just a nostalgic romantic at heart.

Thank you Fuji, for bringing the romance back to this craft I love so dearly.



Digital.Contact.Sheet.

Fujifilm X-Pro1 | Fujinon XF35mm F1.4R