What's next for you?

[stuart_115]

I’m thinking about doing some 9x12, which requires some home development . It would be my first time large format and home developing. Need to buy the film (Fomapan 100 or 400) and equipment first.

 

[DownUnder]

(...) your posts in recent months have talked about downsizing and minimizing your gear and collections. If you feel you want to spend your time doing things other than scanning and adding metadata, go for it. Because my photos are largely digital, and they are always sorted into appropriate labeled and dated folders, it's easy to stay on top of organizing things. I can't really imagine having six decades worth of film images to be scanned and categorized!

One way to dent the pile is set aside a couple of hours a day to scan and sort. This will leave you with time for other things.

All good advice. To me at my age, minimalism is the only intelligent way - this got rammed home to us last year when we pack for our move back to the (Australian) mainland. We discovered we had enough 'essentials' to fill 200+ cartons as well as basic furnishings and personal effects (and three cats). A drastic rethinking was called for. The felines survived the cull, but we left for Melbourne with less than half the amount of stuff we'd intended to take, which made life far easier but also shocked us with the realization of what we had accumulated in five years.

Humans are hoarders. The Marie Kondos offer me only temporary solutions. I had way too many boxes of cameras and darkroom gear, in duplicates, triplicates. even quadruplicates (Nkkormats, Contax Gs, Rollei TLRs). I've kept most of my cameras, but many photo things were sold, loaned out to friends, donated to charity shops, or given away to those who will use them.

I reduced my stock of outdated photo paper to +/- 5% of what I had hoarded. Still too much film so +/- 80%will be sold. Also my beloved Leitz Focomat 1c, I bought it in 1999 and have used at most 25 times, my multiformat LPL 7700 is a more efficient tool.

Like so many I buy photo things, put them away in boxes, forget I have them and buy another of the same. I have to learn to say "enough!" and change this behavior.

My partner buys cookbooks, nonfiction paperbacks, history, old travel guides and occasionally novels. The cats, like all good existentialists, eat like lions and use up a lot of litter, but otherwise contribute nothing to the clutter. We should follow their example.

Last week I was in a suburban op shop in Ballarat and picked up an as new Pentax MX with the legendary 50/1.4 Takumar, case, filters and instruction manual, donated by an elderly gentleman who hadn't used it in 20+ years. The battery still works. Cost was A$49.

Why do I need a Pentax, never mind when will I ever use it? Two of my Nikkormats and three Contax G1s still have films I loaded when we were still in Tasmania last year.

Yes, I'm now scanning more, culling, tidying up captions/keywords, designing a workable archival system for negatives and slides, and cutting up old prints. Photographing pretty scenery isn't my thing and the locals here are leery of strangers with cameras, so my walks with camera/s are off the agenda until lockdown ends and we can travel further afield.

Like most things in life, the list never gets shorter, but it all keeps me going.