“Fail again. Fail better.”
I’ve just had a bad day in the dark room.
Trials and tribulations with three 35mm canisters of black and white film. Two turned out not to have wound on in my camera. One wound on badly to the developing reel. As a result, all three rolls of film are lost: images, ideas, moments; gone. I took a deep breath, cleaned up and went home.
My 35mm camera is new (to me) and I’m still getting used to it. I’ve lost rolls in it before, in much the same way as when I was getting used to my large format camera: I’ve lost a lot of 4×5 film sheets too. But with practise I’ve made less mistakes.
I remember taking a holiday in Japan some years ago. I found to my joy and amazement, that film was extremely cheap. My camera, a Chinon SLR that I had used regularly for some years, had never had so much film put through it in a short amount of time. I photographed everything: buildings, people, nature, transport, even drains at one point. Photo after photo. I learned so much and had so much fun. I’d learned to handle that camera as well as a pen.
Film nowadays is expensive. Mistakes made in exposure and development are felt so much more as a result, but I won’t stop taking chances, just as much as I won’t stop making mistakes and learning from them. To get to use a camera as an extension of my arm is the goal: pure expression.
Burning Details 
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