Daily Theme #5

FILM

Megan Tung

1/24/11

The best feeling in the world, hands down, is getting your photos back from the
developer. To some, this concept is foreign, especially to those who were born in the
twentieth to twenty-first century. Film photography is an old art which has been largely
overtaken by the technology of digital cameras, but it still exists today.

Before the memory cards, image sensors, and single-lens-reflex cameras, there was
film. It still exists today, but it is hardly seen. One roll of film gives you thirty-six exposures,
and you won’t be able to see how it turns out until you get them developed.

During the summer of 2009, right before we were about to go on vacation, I found
my mother’s old silver automatic film camera in a drawer located under our living room
television. It was very dusty, a plastic flap was sticking out of it, and it obviously hadn’t been
touched in years. After cleaning it off and taping down the broken switch, I begged my
mother to let me use it for our trip. Together, we bought new batteries and film – I still
remember, it was a Kodak ISO 200 pack – and she taught me how to load the camera and take
a picture.

I had four rolls of film for a two-week holiday, which meant I had a hundred and
forty-four shots. I looked at the camera in my hands, in all its stunning silver complexity, and
realized that this was going to be a bit of a challenge. I was known for taking pictures left and
right, and I could probably take a hundred and forty-four photos in half a day. So in my head I
told myself that I only had this much film; I could not waste it.

We ventured to ‘Japan’s Hawaii’, Okinawa. We visited temples, aquariums, beaches

and restaurants, beautiful places that made me shutter-happy. But each time I loaded my film,
a voice inside my head told me, ‘You have thirty-six chances to capture this beauty.’ So every
shot I took on that trip was planned carefully; I went through great pains to get each
photograph – whether it was standing under the blazing sun so that I could get the whale that
was jumping out of the water, or yelling at my cousins to clear off because they were in my
frame.
 I’d never felt prouder when I returned home and dropped the four tiny yellow tubes
on the counter of the photo shop. The old man who worked there gave me a receipt and told
me to come back tomorrow.

I waited. And it seemed like an eternity. I paced around the house, going through old
photo albums, looking at the digital photos my mother had taken on the trip, checking the
time almost every five minutes.

The next day finally came, and I returned to the shop. I gave the man my receipt and
paid my money. He hobbled to the back of the store and came back with a packet of
photographs. They were enclosed in a yellow pouch, and as soon as he placed them in my
hands, the thickness of the bag excited me. I was barely in the car when I pulled the pile of
photos out onto my lap, and I couldn’t stop smiling as I gazed upon all the memories, flipping
them through my hands one by one.

I’d never felt so rewarded in my life, knowing that each shot was taken with extreme
care, because it showed in the photos. Oh, and the colors, they were so vibrant! The grain, so
fine and detailed! They all looked prettier, somehow, than any photos I’d ever taken in my
life.

That feeling still remains with me every time I get my photos back from the
developer.

Maybe it’s because taking pictures with a film camera makes you more precarious
about what you’re photographing, or maybe it’s because it seems like a big effort to develop
your photos when you could just take them digitally. But when I pull my photos out of the
packet, that feeling of anticipation never fails to be there. It’s the first time I’m viewing the
stills I took, the moment in time that I thought was worth documenting. And every so often
there’s a shot that makes you think, ‘Wow. I took that?’

There’s not a more rewarding activity in the world.