Life Musings + Mount Davidson

This weekend, I met up with a few people I knew of on Instagram, and climbed to the top of Mount Davidson. It sounds incredibly daring and difficult, but you park at almost the top anyway, so it's nothing more than a short trek. I will add that it was foggy and rainy, so my "cute" boots were just vehicles that caused me to slip and slide around, but I digress.

I really love the concept of Instagram. I won't blather about it forever, but let's just say it's incredible that you can meet people interested in the same things as you and build a community outside your natural ones (school, work, neighbors, etc.), but it doesn't feel weird. Can we just talk about how awesome that is?! It seems like these days, everything is about fake people you meet on the internet (hello Catfish) so it's nice to know that there is a place where online community building is legit.

ANYWAY. To do a complete 180: I've been thinking a lot about myself as a person. Am I a photographer? Am I a writer? What is it that I want to do? What am I even good at? When I stopped to remind myself that I couldn't answer all these questions at once, I focused on one of them to start with.

Am I a photographer?

And if I am, what kind? And HOW?

It's nearly too much to think about, but what I settled on for now is that I am a photographer, because I love to make photographs. I think that's all there really is to it, truthfully. And as for what kind, well, whatever's in front of me! But the how, the how is what threw me for a loop. 

You see, I love film photography. I've talked about it before, and I can talk about it some more if you want me to (probably not) but the gist of it is that it's a dying art. And I don't just mean that very little of our generation understands how to use it, but also that it's getting incredibly hard to participate in it, even if you have the knowledge. The price of film is up, negative scanners are unreliable, and professional jobs take weeks at a time. In the era of instant gratification, film just doesn't cut it.

While I will allow myself to ignore these simple facts for the foreseeable future and shoot rolls and rolls of film for as long as I can, I also need to find ways to sustain my love for film in a world where it's disappearing. Part of that is using digital photography in a way that is as personally satisfying as film. So today, I give you these photographs from Mount Davidson, digital, but altered to look like film. They were even shot the way I do with film, all manual!

It's a compromise, but then, I find life is full of those. Happy Monday!