Let me tell you about a roll of film that went through a lot.
Not because of the places and things I captured with it, no, I mean way more literal than that. This roll of film lived a rough life but came out the other side and here I am to tell its story.
I mentioned in my earlier post that I had brought a vintage SLR camera with me to Atlanta.
I have posted photos from this camera before,here, and I knew it wasn’t perfect but “perfect” has never really mattered to me.
It’s a Carena Micro RSD and we found it in a box with random camera stuff at a flea market in Sweden, for a bargain. We got it right before our wedding back in 2013 and asked one of our friends to capture our day with it.
So it holds a lot of sentimental value for me, and I wanted to shoot more film, so it got to come along to Atlanta.
I used it every once in a while over our 7 months there, and then when the roll was full I re-winded it- but something didn’t feel right. I opened the back and oh no the camera had chewed the film; it was torn apart and not at all rolled up, so I had just unwillingly exposed it to light and subsequently destroyed the film even further than the camera had already done. I closed the camera, ran to my bed and threw it under the cover where I could safely, in the dark, remove the film and put it in a canister, and for extra security- a black sunglasses bag that I had grabbed in the haste. That would have to do until later.

Months later, back in LA, I thought, maybe I could use this roll for practicing developing negatives at home- something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. If it’s already botched I wouldn’t need to be so scared of destroying some kind of masterpiece (which obviously would have been my thought otherwise) and I would feel more relaxed, free to experiment and learn.
I had everything I needed to develop negatives at home; David had gifted me a whole beginner’s kit for Christmas, including a dark bag for getting the film onto the spool and into the development tank.
I looked at so many videos on YouTube of people showing how to do that part before I dared to give it a try myself. At some point you just gotta go for it, right?
It was so difficult and frustrating, and I could feel the film buckling and folding and probably getting fingerprints all over it. I didn’t know my hands could get so sweaty! At one point I had to take a break (there was a lot of swearing going on) and come back to it after I had calmed down a little.
But when I finally did get it onto the spool I felt so gosh darn proud of myself. Accomplished even.
The beginner’s kit I had was from Ilford and it contained everything I needed to develop two rolls of black and white film. I read through the manual and looked at videos until I felt fairly confident I could do it, and I also wrote down everything I had to do in list form so I could check it off as I went along.
It was quite easy, no mishaps, and when I was hanging up the developed negatives to dry it felt really good, because I could already see that it had worked. There were pictures on there!

Next step was scanning, and it took me another round of reading and looking at YouTube videos to get the hang of it but at that stage there is no time rush- like there is while developing- so I could take however long I needed.
There were definite signs of the film having been exposed to light, marks from bending and tearing and lots of dust, but I felt so proud of myself, and I really do love these photos.
I think they turned out “perfect”.

Bathroom in the morning.

Coffee and vitamins.

Messy bed.

Water and vitamins.
Really love this one, the texture of it is so wonderful to me.

Great example of when mistakes can make something better than you could have planned for.

Toilet paper in the wind.

I like this one too. A branch of cherry blossom in a brutalist world.
A security guard came up to me as I was taking this photo and told me "you aren't allowed to photograph train stations". I had no clue. But I just pointed to the cherry tree and said "I'm just taking photos of the pretty flowers" and that made him smile and leave me alone.

David with a lot of beard.

I have a lot of photos of this house. There's just something about it that intrigues me. Yes, it's pretty, but it's also something so doll house about that window.

The way America sorts its cords is baffling to me.

And we'll end with another favorite of mine. Magnolias! Also- there's a ladybug in this photo.

Since these photos I have developed a lot more rolls of film, even in color, and I think I've gotten the hang of it. It's certainly not as stressful anymore- a lot of the time it's even meditative- and I am super fast at getting the film onto the spool in the dark now!

I'll continue to share my Developing Journey here as I go. It brings me so much joy.

/Lotta

I remember having full thoughts.
I don’t remember losing them though, but they probably got misplaced somewhere in the pandemic.
Maybe if I sit down to write they will return?
Last week I walked so much I kept waking up in the middle of the night with cramps in the foot. Let me tell you, it’s quite difficult to discretely get rid of a foot cramp without waking up the person sleeping next to you. Leg, straight up to the sky, fingers desperately pulling back on toes hoping for relief, tension everywhere, PAIN! Teeth clenched.
Wait. Did I do it?
Relax. Breathe.
NOPE! OW OW OW!
Repeat.

Things I’ve noticed after being in Atlanta for a couple of weeks now:
-Everyone has a dog or two.
-Revving and/or blasting loud music from your car seems to be huge in Atlanta.
-Parks on every corner! Love the many green spaces.
-It smells like weed everywhere.
-Atlanta feels a lot like Gothenburg. It surprises me every day how Gothenburgy it is. Train tracks through the city, a bit roughness, bricks and concrete next to each other, beauty in the old. Unpretentious and full of life.
-My outfits seem a bit out of place here. More so than any other place I’ve been to. Not that it bothers me, it’s just an observation.
-Atlanta feels like it was made for springtime! Flowering trees like fluffy colorful clouds along the sidewalks. Confetti on the ground. Green leaves bursting from every branch.

I put on music, sit down in front of the computer, and hope for full thoughts.
Are there still just bubbles in there? Scattered pieces of sentences and scrambled words without an end. Do I have something I can focus on, cling to, rope it in and fold it up into a neat little bow of ThoughtFull-ness. Something that makes sense?
I see a piece of thread sticking out from underneath a pile of wayward thinking. If I pull on it, will it all just unravel into more fragmented ideas or will I be able to wind it into a ball of yarn? A ball of thoughts perfectly rolled up into a manageable size?
I will need a basket for all of these.

A whole year of this damn pandemic came and went and sometimes I think that maybe we didn't even have a 2020- we just went straight from March 2020 into March 2021.
The year long month of March.
In my last post I talked about taking up analog photography again, and today I'm here to show a bunch of digital photos taken around the house. I have a new camera (a Nikon Z6) and it's been a lot of fun getting to know it over the past couple of weeks. Since I love vintage things, I've been using old camera lenses, a favorite among them is one that we bought at a flea market in Amsterdam (a Nikkor 35mm f1.4) many years ago. To me that's the perfect combination of mixing the new with the old.
It's strange how I went from taking photos with DSLR cameras every single day- for this blog and my etsy shop and even some photo jobs- to exclusively shooting with my iPhone. Everything changed when we moved to LA (almost 6 years ago now) and it felt like I left so much of my life behind me, and I didn't know how to make it all fit into this new life I was living. I've come to the conclusion that it just had to take some time- it's impossible to force what used to be into what is right now, but maybe it is possible to find new ways into what the core was all along. That's how I feel with photography. I know it's always going to be a big part of my life, I just can't force myself to use it to recreate the past.
So here I am again, taking photos, editing in Lightroom, and uploading them to my blog.
Like before. But not at all like then. Like now.

But you know what? I'm not going to talk more right now. Let's just look at some pretty photos, okay?

Hope these photos felt good in your eyes.

It's been so long I almost feel like I should introduce myself again, but nah, this is my blog and I'm still the same as the last time I was here.
No need for any "what have you done these last few months?" because we all know nothing happens every day is the same and when all this is over blah blah.
Let's skip that.
I wanted to talk about my new hobby. Film photography.
It starts years ago actually, but maybe this is when it takes off for real?

David got me an old Rollop Lipca for my birthday a couple of years ago. I've been wanting to shoot more on film (I took classes in film development when I was in my early twenties and ever since then it's been a dream of sorts).
The Rollop Lipca stood on a shelf for a long time. I didn't understand the manual- it was for a similar camera but not exactly the same- and I worried I would somehow destroy the camera before I even got to use it.
This winter though, I decided to get to know it for real. I took photos around the house and a couple of self portraits.
Last week I had them developed and it was SO exciting receiving the email with a huge zip file with my very first roll of 120mm photos.
Some of them were a bit too shaky, some where just not that great (you have to manually roll the film forward after every shot and it's not completely easy to get it exact, so there was one instant when the top of David's head ended up in the bottom of a photo of my fiddle Leaf Fig). But I did get a few that I actually really like. let's take a look, shall we?

Figuring out how to get the focus sharp for self portraits is definitely something that I have to figure out, but I really love the look of these two self portraits. They feel like great encouragement.

This window is a constant source of inspiration for me. The combination of dark shadows and bright soft light just gets me going.
I love this photo, it came out even better than I expected.

Dramatic backlit monstera, is another one of my things.

This one obviously came out WAY too shaky but I still wanted to share it because this journey is not about being perfect. I'm learning, and the great thing with film photo is that the mistakes can still be charming- I mean it looks warm a cozy as hell, right?!

But now you're saying "The title of this blog post mentions TWO rolls of film, so what's up with that, Lotta?"
Well, I'll tell you in a second, if you'd just CALM DOWN.
Before David and I got married, way back in 2013 we found an old Carena Micro RSD 35mm camera at a flea market in Sweden. We wanted our wedding to be photographed by our friends, with different types of cameras, so we ended up having it documented on a Polaroid, a DSLR, mobile phones of course, and then this little Carena.
The wedding photos turned out great, and I kept using the Carena all through that autumn.
Then in March 2014 I loaded it with a black and white film and brought it along for a weekend in our home town visiting our families.

There was one major thing that happened in March 2014, and that was that our short film Lights Out went viral.
And that happened the exact day as David took this photo of me sitting in my parent's kitchen sofa with sunlight in my eye, completely unknowing of how our lives were about to change.

Dramatic skies over the bridge Munksjöbron in our hometown Jönköping.

This is the gate to the courtyard of the apartment building where my parents and I lived up until I was 9 years old. I must have been feeling nostalgic walking past this place to take a picture.

It's also quite nice to see that my love for photographing places where shadows and light meet has always been there.

I took these three photos in Sund, just outside of Jönköping.

I think this was taken almost exactly a year later, in March 2015, when David's mother, Agnetha, came to visit us in Gothenburg right before we were about to leave to go to LA to make Lights Out- the feature film.

And when we left Sweden I decided to bring the Carena camera with me...

A blurry self portrait of me dancing in the apartment we were finally able to get in LA in 2016 after having to rent airbnb's for a year. We had almost no furniture for the longest time.

And then we bought our house.

And I filled it with plants.

And as usual I fell in love with the light and the shadows.

Somewhere around here I had forgotten about the roll of film and opened up the camera for a quick second before I realized my mistake. So a couple of photos was just white blur, but this one here turned out quite beautiful in all its faded moodiness.

And then we'll end this with another photo of the dramatic monstera- one of my biggest sources of inspiration.

Looking through the photos from this roll of film was quite emotional- our whole journey was in there.
Even though I kept forgetting about the Carena, I always picked it back up again.
Now there is a new roll of film in it and I won't let it sit for years this time.
And as for the Rollop Lipca, our journey together has just started. I feel so inspired, for the first time in a long time.
It makes me wonder, where will we be in 6 years? What moments will I have covered by then?