A few weeks ago, I was talking to fellow Fellow Dave Engel and I realized I needed a new hobby. One of the toughest parts of not being in school anymore is the lack of stimulation. Though I did not love every class I took in school, it always kept me on my toes that I was constantly learning things outside of my comfort zone, simultaneously to boot. But I noticed here my life starting to fall into bit of a, well, routine. Work, home, Challenge, work, home, sleep (sometimes), play with my cat!!! Work, home – you get the idea. So I decided to create a darkroom in my house. Now, besides the time I printed one singular photo at summer camp when I was 11 years old (probably my first selfie actually) I have no experience with a dark room, but I had a gut feeling it was something I would like to do. So after about three weeks of painstaking research seeing what was involved, and where I could get the best deals, I can now say I am a proud film photographer.

Shooting film is fun. It teaches discipline, which either of my parents will tell you I surely lack. If you have 36 exposures, that’s how many pictures you can take. On top of that, printing a single picture costs not an insignificant amount of money (about $1-2/print, depending on how many times I screw up) but a lot of time! First you decide what to print, then you expose a “test strip” to get the exposure/brightness/contrast right, then you wait a minute to see what that looks like, then you decide what level you like, then you expose the photograph, then you wait another minute, then you hang that photo up to dry. Congratulations! You just printed your first photo, and it only took a bajillion minutes.

But this time, this discipline, is half the fun. I feel like I am building towards something. When I take a photo, my common bad joke I say is “You’ll see it in two weeks.” Taking away the element of instant gratification that digital cameras give us has really made me rethink my approach. Before I take a photo I think, is this something I really want to spend time and money on reproducing? A question we should all begin to ask ourselves before we do something – is it worth it? I’m looking at you Dan Gilbert…