Selling Souls
Another photo I recently scanned for a book project containing 10 years of Karen’s travel writing from all over:
A boy sells birds to passers-by at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. The (semi-Buddhist) belief is that setting the caged birds free helps set your own soul free from the circle of rebirth.
Maybe not a great photo, but it shows something I miss in this era of perfectly exposed and color balanced digi-camera pix: the unexpected. One of the things I liked about shooting film (and still do) is the unexpected color shifts, and the surprise of getting film back from the lab. Death to chimping!
I’m not overly sentimental about film, but I sometimes miss that lack of perfection. The inability to “correct” everything, eliminate grain, etc., sometimes leaves us with pictures that are more accurate but somehow further from the truth. Slippery semantic slope, I know. My memories are not precise, but my mind filters out the unessential. Our images should be somewhat impressionistic as well (without hiding behind treatments masquerading as style). And I miss slapping that film down, fresh from the dryer, loupe in hand. There was a weight to that experience wholly different from chimping.
The weight is the wait. Or the wait is the weight. I always get that mixed up.
I would also also say, “…pictures that are more accurate but somehow less visually interesting.”
Or, as Shakespeare said, “A 5D by any other name would look the same.”
I miss the darkroom.