Rollei film backlog, end of the year mishmash

Posted on December 24, 2013

So this is the end of the year and time to evaluate how I did on my New Year’s resolution to develop all my old Rollei film. I did pretty well though I did not finish. I have 15 rolls left, I guess I should have counted them all but it was definitely over 75 so it means I developed 60 rolls. I think what was good about it was the archeology of my life that it was, and my ability to look at a lot of bad photos, and it somehow having lower stakes because the film was so old. I did find little bits of charm and the occasional unexpected happy accident, which is a good outcome of the self sabotage of putting film a drawer for 7 years. I’m sorry to see it end in a way.

That’s also McCarren, which all the locals will know immediately.

I have two posts to put up by the end of the year (including this one I guess, so one down!) Because I’ve gotten two batches processed since I last updated. I will send three more batches and then it will all be over, this will go into next year, by less than a couple months. Then it’s up to me to keep shooting with my Rollei, along with my phone and DSLR. Then I’m committed to getting the shutter speeds on the camera looked at and seeing if I can get the viewfinder magnifier adjusted to align better with the glass, that is my resolution on it for 2014. I’ve already gotten a bright screen put in during a previous repair of the camera. In the time since I’ve bought this camera I’ve developed the need for reading glasses which makes using it a bit difficult and I have to come up with a process that works better.

There is film from my neighborhood in Brooklyn, New Orleans, the swamp tour I took when I was there which is not in the city but close to Slidell, and a roll from Venice which I guess fell out of bag and became part of my uncategorized hoard. Let’s put up the Venice frame here because it’s cute it’s the symbolic winged lion.

Here are pictures from the swamp, this film is E-6 that I didn’t remember shooting and I went ahead and asked them to cross process it. Oddly E-6 was more expensive processing at the mail away lab, which is odd to me as a person who worked as a photo assistant in the days of shooting chrome, when it was such high volume, and there were no prints or contacts so it was the cheapest processing.

A couple from the St. Louis Cemetery. Not nearly as good as the negative film I shot there, which was perhaps the best stuff that came out of this.

Somewhere in New Orleans, I don’t know the city well enough to say where.

One of the things about doing this in blog form is I decided the photos didn’t have to be good, some of them were, at least I enjoyed a few. But it was OK with me if they weren’t because most of them were not going to be and this was a project about dealing with procrastination and inadequacy to begin with. It started with a failure, in that 70-80 rolls of exposed film in a drawer is a defeat already, so my thoughts on it were it’s only up from there. I don’t know why I was willing to face that particular flaw this year but I am glad I was finally ready. If I died suddenly and they all would likely end up in the trash anyway, or I could have chucked them to leave behind any guilt for letting it get that way. That could have been a resolution too, for some people that might have been the choice to make. So I hope any of you who watched this unfold enjoyed it or sympathized with it. There will be four more installments and then it’s over, that’s good I think. On to new things.