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My public high school had a dark room. A rare occurence or American secondary schools, it was something I took full advantage of starting in my sophomore year.

Our photo teacher was an aging hippie who blasted the Hair musical soundtrack among other relics of the late-60s/early-70s. We could get a roll of Ilford HP4 for all of $4, which, granted, went a lot further in the early 2000s. Still, for a Taco Bell lunch you could get 36 shots of pretty great black & white filmstock and develop for free. Photo paper was sold at a discount and there were a few enlargers available for making prints.

After countless moves and ill-considered purges of memorabilia, I don't think I have a single shot from high school--negative or print. Still, I learned the basics of composition, the exposure triangle and had a modicum of photographic eye trained into me. I'm very thankful.

There's only one camera shop left in Anchorage. It's been here since the 60s and I try to support them when I can (buying film, accessories, the rare new piece of kit). They contract out with a local guy who develops, scans and prints 135 and 120 film.

While our local film processor does great work, I missed the ritual of developing and picked up this guy to be able to develop at least B&W film at home. First roll went pretty well with some CineStill combo developer/fixer. I still have work to do tweaking my process after "scanning" (shooting them with my Fuji camera on a tripod) negatives, but it's nice to be able to finish a roll and see the results within an hour.

It's good to be able to shoot 35mm film again. The methodical pace, the higher stakes per-shot and the charm of imperfect image quality all make for a great contrast with shooting 40mp RAWs on modern digital. Here are a few more shots from my 35mm experiments~