We used to take our negatives to a film processor to have them developed. Then we waited. Long ago we waited for a week, and eventually that time was reduced to just an hour. We’d collect the envelopes of photographs and before we left the store we were going through our shots one-by-one.
This one isn’t focused. This one has a blurry arm from it moving during the shot. In this one her eyes are closed. In this one he looked away. And this one, yes this one goes in a frame.
I say this with a bit of nostalgia, for there was something I enjoyed about the process. About the not knowing how good a shot was until long after I took the shot. About the surprise of a shot being better or, sadly, worse than I thought.
Film also gave me something else that I miss. As a photographer using film, every click of the shutter costed money. This made me more selective about the shots I would take… and not take.
It is an odd thing that I have photographs burned into my memory, but they are photographs that I never took.
There is the lost kitten jumping after a minister’s tassels during a wedding. I was being paid as the photographer and didn’t want to ‘waste the shot’ since they paid me by the roll of film.
The shot I did not take of the salt flats of Utah that faded into the sky without a horizon line. A brilliant memory that probably would not have made a good photo anyway.
There was the shot I lined up at Pike Place in Seattle, of an older man sitting on the hood of a parked car enthralled in a book, while cops on the street behind him tended to a fender-bender. I can still see the image that I did not take, feeling like I was invading his privacy.
We seem so much more free to take photos now, always having a camera in our pocket, and not a concern of the cost of taking one more shot.
But of all the shots I didn’t take, the photographs that still linger in my memory. These come to me from an era when film was the only option and the cost of the next shot lingered in my mind.
