Christmas was different this year.  Mostly, it was the first holiday without my sweet grandma.  She passed in early December and it rocked my whole world.  That is a completely different story and one that I’m still not ready to talk about just yet.  Besides grieving, our whole Christmas schedule was thrown off.  We didn’t even put up a tree this year.  No garland.  No lights.  No Christmas wine.  I bought Dylan a large Christmas present that has been on his “bucket list” for a decade, so he only got one thing – that wasn’t even wrapped.  Dylan’s family always does Christmas in January, so that wasn’t different, but even MY family did Christmas in January this year.

Dylan, however, outdid himself.  I literally cried happy tears of joy when I opened it!  First, I unwrapped a box full of film.  Then, a box that held something others would consider obsolete.  The box held a film camera, the Nikon F100.  You know the kind that you have to load 24-shots worth of film and have the possibility of loading it backwards.  The kind you keep in the fridge.  The kind you have to send off to be developed.  The kind you can’t see as you shoot, so you have to be pretty spot on in-camera to have it turn out.  The kind that automatically makes a hard copy (the negatives) for you to keep without worrying about if technology will know what to do with it in ten years, like the floppy disk.  Yep, he bought me an old-school film camera and it made me cry.

I’m not going to be using it at a wedding or anything paid for quite some time, but I have had the opportunity to run two rolls of film through it.  The first 24 frames were used to photograph my sweet husband, our four-legged babies, and pieces of my grandma’s garden, which really was her art.  The second set of 24 frames was used to photograph my sister and her sweet daughter, who just turned 3.  

I still have different brands of film I need to try out before I decide which is my favorite, but I think I’m going to like being a film photographer in the (hopefully not-so-distant) future!

– Mylah Renae