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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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A shorter gemlog for rambly things.
I was thinking recently about how expensive film or analogue photography is. You have to pay for the roll of film itself, and then the costs of developing and scanning that film. Unless you get your own developing kit and scanner, a single shot can cost anywhere up to a dollar at the prices available to me. A roll per month would set me back about $400 per year, at 432 frames at $1 ea.
I sort of have mixed feelings about this. If I think about how much it costs relative to my current digital camera, it's expensive. On the other hand, if I think about it relative to the digital camera I want to buy (i.e. $3000+), it's not that much at all.
But part of it has to do, I think, with how my brain deals with both one-off and recurring costs. A one-off expense is bad, but it only happens once, and everything after is free. I paid for my digital camera, but the thousands of photos I've taken with it were free. The film camera was cheaper, but the monthly costs associated film makes it feel to me like picking up a habit.
I'm not the first person to remark about how it feels as though the horizons have been closed off ever since the pandemic hit, and most countries closed their borders. I know I won't be the last, either, even as vaccines start to make their way around the world -- faster in some places, slower (or not at all) in others -- and we all grope towards some sort of normalcy. But deep down I don't think "normal" is going to return. Too much has changed, for too long, and honestly it's not like "normal" was great (or particularly normal) anyway.
But I really do miss travel. It was a luxury, but it was also an opportunity to uproot myself from the everyday, from the routine, and to go somewhere different. To catch, at least for a while, a glimpse of a different life.
I moved out of London just about a year and a half ago, and my memories of the place have already begun to fade like an old photo in the sun. So it was a bit of a pleasant surprise to have my old journals from that time -- notebooks I had passed to a close friend to carry back with him, before I packed up to travel again -- returned. Not just the notebooks, either, but old letters I wrote during the long evenings when I had just arrived in the city, without knowing a single soul, letters I put in envelopes and never sent.
Is the past real? From a certain perspective, only the present moment is real. The past is only a story, and the future is even less than that. It's these artefacts, even more than mere memory, which form the proof that those days really happened. A snapshot of my state of mind then, a message I cast from a then-uncertain present into an even more uncertain future.
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