I have taken one photography class in my life and truly, I don’t count it as a real class. I was taught aperture and ISO and shutter speeds, but the only knowledge I actually gained from that class was that high ISO makes things grainy, “Cain’s Rules of Color” which my professor (Prof. Cain) swore he did not make up, everything looked fine if I just left it at f4.0 + 125 speed, and you shouldn’t help someone else do their project because she’s a teacher’s pet and will get an A and you will not.

But I digress.

Everything I’ve learned from photography has just been trial and error, and experimentation, but I’ve always had editing to fall back on if I made a mistake. But if I had started in this field 20 years ago I wouldn’t have had that option. Photography is by no means easy, but film photography definitely presents a different challenge than digital. Photographers who know how to manipulate film are so much more talented than I can ever hope to be. So with that, I’m making an effort to learn manual film photography.

Here are four rolls worth of film I’ve taken over the past few months. Some of the film is a bit spoiled or cracked, and I also don’t have a scanner so I jerry-rigged a system up where I used the light of my phone to backlight the negatives and then took photos of them and inverted the colors in Photoshop, so the quality of these are not the greatest. But they’re not half bad for my first attempt, there are actually a few I really quite like.

I’ll continue to work on this and post galleries every once in a while when I develop a few roles. Until then, I guess I need to actually purchase a real scanner.