Look Into The Lights

          You're probably all familiar, at least to some degree, with what film looks like when you get it back from the shop. (If you're not then, kid, you missed an era of great things, and I'm sorry.) Remember how everyone looked like ghosts on those black strips, even though the prints would come out normal? I love the game of film photography - the concept of not being able to check your shots right away; its insistence of artistry, practice, patience, and honesty; and of course those beautiful grains and light glitches that never go out of fashion - but I admit I pay little attention to actual filmstrips. I mean who does? They eventually all end up gathering dust in some drawer in your bedroom... Which is why this latest photography experiment I undertook that has left me infatuated with actual film was something pretty special.
           I'll just go ahead and reveal what was in the previous picture I posted: Reversal Film. You can look up the details on good ole Wikipedia, but if you don't need to know everything about everything, it's basically just film that when you look at it, you can see the picture exactly the way you saw it when you took the shot. Colloquially, we call it "slide film" because back before there were digital media and Powerpoint, people mounted reversal film on slides and projected them in classrooms, for instance, via analog slide projectors. /geekmode
          Anyways, when I was in Japan earlier in March, I had my first encounter with reversal film being sold, and I couldn't resist. Five months and 36 shutterpresses later, I'm back home in my living room, cutting up filmstrips, mounting them in tiny white plastic frames, and admiring the finished product against lightbulbs. Here's a photojournal of my first experience with slide. 

Enjoy. =]

Indoors, not into the lights yet.

Outdoors, into the light.

Back indoors (because it started to rain), now into the lights.

Time to mount.

First, cut.

Place, then press.

Voila.

Preview: "Look Into The Lights"