A New Lens

I can pinpoint the exact moment that I stopped photographing. After a high school career and a college degree, I put the camera down. He’d told us all it would happen, that two-thirds of us would give it up sooner or later. I had vowed to never be one of those… quitters.

Black and white with a 35mm lens, the closest focal length to the human eye. If it didn’t fit perfectly into the frame, I didn’t print it. I didn’t crop. Ever. Instead, the edges of each TMax P3200 shot were burned into the paper, proof that I didn’t cheat.

Digital photography, now that was cheating, the biggest offense. Because where was the art of the process? Where was the proof that the photographer had been up to her elbows in developer and stop bath and, worst of all, fixer, risking all for the craft?

No, I got out at the right time, before I had a chance to sell out. The camera, an old manual Nikon FE I bought off a student for a hundred and fifty bucks, sat in the closet, and I don’t even know where it is now. I must’ve sold it somewhere down the line.

That day, the final day I picked up the Nikon for the last time, it felt like work. And I felt stifled. My heart just wasn’t in it, and if it wasn’t in it, then what was the point?

I’d found a new job, a creative job, and my mind was so entranced, so occupied by that new world that I closed up shop and haven’t looked back.

But maybe I should have. Maybe I will now, though I don’t know where one might even find the chemicals to develop it all. It’s probably illegal now; it has been a quarter century after all.

We shall see what we see.