Today is the second anniversary of me flying back into Moscow from my adventures in Murmansk, Ekaterinburg and Perm, the second anniversary of seeing Red Square properly for the first time, and I think the post I’m going to commemorate the event with is this one, Russia on film.
Back in 2018, I found three ancient rolls of 35mm film hiding in a cupboard so I invested 99p (+£2.90 postage) in a a film camera to use them up – an Olympus Trip MD3, I think. Well, it was quite good fun. I actually don’t know where those three rolls went. One I used in Rome, one I used in Russia, I must have bought another because I’ve got at least four canisters knocking around the house but I have no idea what I used them for. Anyway, Lucy Moon recently did a video on the basics of film photos which reminded me that 1) I have a film camera I want to use more often 2) I have a pack of photos from around Russia that I’ve never really waved around. And so this anniversary post was born.
I knew long before I went that I’d be making a scrapbook. I like my scrapbooks to be as mixed media as possible and besides using up that film, I liked the idea of having a mixture of digital photos, Instaxes taken there and then and some film photos, with that characteristic texture and weird colour, not to mention all the scraps picked up along the way – postcards, tickets, receipts, boarding passes and all the rest. Actually, my original plan was to take the 10×10 scrapbook with me and write in it along the way. I’m glad I didn’t because I struggled with the hand luggage as it was and my book became two books with a total thickness of at least eight inches thick by the time I’d finished. Imagine dragging that around five planes and two trains!
Unfortunately, it was elderly film and an elderly and cheap camera and some of the film photos got eaten so out of a roll of 36, I ended up with 20 photos, of which in turn only 17 were usable. (By “eaten” I mean that I think the film disintegrated in the developers’ hands). Some of the survivors have a nice vintage look. Some of them look like my grandparents’ holiday photos from the early 90s and I think that proportion was even higher in Rome. Also, either the majority of the photos I took were in Moscow or the majority that got eaten were outside Moscow. I think the former because I think I quite quickly got tired of swapping three cameras around.
Looking at Lucy’s photos and her blog, I think what I need to do in future is take twice the film with me and take photos of ordinary moments and places as well as the landmarks. I think in both Rome and Russia I felt like I had to save my film photos for special occasions. Digital photos are throwaways – there’s nothing stopping you taking 30 photos of the same thing, your food, an interesting shaped crack in a wall and I think I need to develop that attitude towards film photos. After all, I know that they’re not going to come out as well as the digital equivalent, so every film and every Instax photo was backed up by a photo on my digital camera, so it doesn’t matter if it comes out badly, I still have a good version of that picture.
And to that end, I’ve ordered some new film and from now on, every time I go somewhere overnight, the film camera will come with me. Maybe I’ll do a post next summer on taking film photos. Maybe you’ll just get used to seeing grainy 90s photos mixed in to future travel posts. Maybe I’ll put it in the camera drawer when my film arrives and forget it’s even there by the time I go anywhere.
