A few years ago, a camera store was going out of business and sold off all their miscellaneous inventory for more than 50% off. I had just returned from New York and missed the first day of the sale, and as I wandered around the aisles, the only thing that grabbed my attention were the boxes upon boxes of Fuji Instax Mini film.
I bought 12 boxes (that’s 120 photos) and promptly forgot about them, as I don’t even have an Instax camera. Every once in a while I would browse Marketplace for one, but this seems to be the item where people will only sell at retail price. Knowing how janky the lens is combined with no urgency, two years passed, and I just now got around to borrowing a printer.
As luck would have it, Zenna had an arsenal of these cameras. She didn’t just have the kitschy colorful Mini, she had ones where you have manual control. And so, she let me borrow one as we perused. I was drawn to the flowers, because of course I was. They’re pretty.
We shot many — so many, as I learned the quirks of the camera. How far does the flash reach? How dark is too dark? How to compose with the discrepancy between lens and viewfinder? It wasn’t rocket science, just trial and error. Still, it felt bad whenever a frame spat out and it didn’t look great.
But as we blew through cartridges, I was getting a few that looked very sexy indeed. According to her, getting one good photo out of an entire cartridge is good enough.
Here are my favorites:
After what felt like squandering shot after shot, I learned to let go of what I can only call pauper style shooting (being incredibly frugal with my frames) to just experimenting. It was freeing — Zenna didn’t seem to care if I used her film or mine. She didn’t care if I said I liked a frame of hers and took it home. She really experimented without holding back, not really framing, and redoing frames that didn’t work out. And it’s true, film is just film at the end of the day, we could always get more. I don’t know when or how I became so stingy about the perception of “wasting” it.
I suppose somewhere along the line, I felt like I must extract every ounce of value out of every morsel.
It’s interesting, what just doing something can teach you about yourself.
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