Filmphotober

Today Billie Blossom debuted #Filmphotober, an art challenge for the month of October. Once a day, every day, for 31 days, take a film photo— preferably relevant to their daily word prompt. Billie is a fancy photographer with fancy film cameras, and me? I’ve never loaded film in a camera in my life, not even once, so of course I didn’t think I was equipped to partake in this challenge until they said drug store disposable cameras and Polaroids do, in fact, “count”, since they create physical pictures on film.

Well! Guess what! I HAVE A POLAROID CAMERA. You may have seen my review of it, in fact!

So what I’m thinking is that once a week I’ll do a post with a roundup of the pictures I took and, uh, well, yeah, that’s it. That’s the extent of my thinking.

Okay, let’s get started.

October 1 - Harvest (Moon)

My lemons are so close to being fully yellow, which means they’re close to being harvested— my first batch! It has been a genuine delight to follow my first indoor potted tree produce flowers and watch them develop into fruit over the last year. Genuinely, Lemony Snicket (that’s her name) makes my heart happy. Plus, her lil lem babies are so round and suspended in the air, I thought they could also fulfill the “(Moon)” part of the day’s word prompt ;)

UNFORTUNATELY, it turns out taking Polaroid pictures is a lot harder than I realized???? I mean, they’re fine if you’re taking a wide shot, but if you’re going for something close-up and very precisely framed... Well, see, the viewfinder window is on the far right of the camera and the lens is in the center and apparently that means what you’ve carefully framed in your little window-thing is not exactly the same angle that your lens is seeing so the result is a composition that you were not expecting at all. Also it’s out of focus. 😤

The challenge suggests just taking one photo per day, to really get you into a different kind of creative mindset than when you take a hundred digital pictures and then choose the best— but my first photo was such a shock to my system! It wasn’t at ALL what I had seen through the viewfinder. Matt took a second photo while he was explaining some of the basics of using this kind of camera to me and then I took one more, trying to get the original picture I’d wanted in the first place.

All of them are bewildering disappointments.

Like, truly. I got really quiet and sulky while Matt was running me through the camera basics after my initial failure because I was so frustrated by how different my image was from what was captured on film. I get exactly the photo I want (more or less) when I use my camera phone! I was not anticipating a learning curve using a different point-and-shoot product!

Rather than push the issue and keep wasting film ($1 per photo!) in the pursuit of my uncapturable picture, I decided that these three will serve as the starting point that people will use when they’re comparing how much better my Polaroid photography skills have come by the end of this month.

Ok, so originally I was thinking I’d build in this post draft over the week, adding in each day’s photo with a caption in real time as I made them, and then publish it when I had the first seven in the bag. But. Dude. Look how much I’ve already written and this is just the first day.

I’m gunna go ahead and publish this entry now, then start a fresh post draft to fill in for the upcoming week of photos. Hopefully I’ll be a little less verbose.

Also, here are some of my digital photos of Lemony Snicket that turned out exactly the way I wanted them to 😤