Peonies and polaroids....

a little picture of the peonies my Gran gave me while we were visiting last week. I started playing with creating an sx70 effect of the photos but I'm not sure if I like it. If it had actually taken with a polaroid camera I would love it but I can't help but feel like it's just, well fake. And as I look at it I feel very distrustful of it. It has taken me a long time to accept digital photography at all, my true love is still black and white film photography and I desperately miss having a darkroom in our house. Spending hours alone under that one red lightbulb, the smell of chemicals on your hands and the world really and truly shut out, creating pictures as if by magic. No other photographers I know miss the darkroom, the hours spent trying to get one print right, the poisonous chemicals infiltrating your hair, staining your clothes, leaving your hands stinking for days. The frustration of the wasted paper, the hours and days you only realise you have lost when you emerge, blinking into the light. God I miss it. It's only the fact that I have an enormous pile of spools, some over three years old, sitting by my desk and waiting to be processed that has stopped me using my film camera recently. Oh how I miss my Pentax K1000, with it's one button, two switches and complete lack of digital anything. It took one tiny battery which has lasted over four years. It's light meter was a dial that moved manually. It had a beauty that my digital camera with it's 279 buttons, switches, options, lights, menus, auto-everythings will never have. It was a real camera.


So there you have it, some peonies and an attempt to recreate the beauty of - what I see as - real photography. An attempt that leaves me with an odd taste in my mouth.