I was in the car the other morning heading along the river through the bluffs, the sun was just over the hills with dew clinging to everything as the last of the was fog stuck in the valleys. It immediately reminded me of a summer morning back in 2011 when I started using my medium format Mamiya c330 more frequently. This image popped into my head from that day and I spent hours trying to track it down. My organization of film scans wasn’t great 12 years ago I guess.

What was special about this imagine was that this was the first shot I got back from a roll of film that felt like I finally figured it out. Previous to this, I was shooting film since 2009, but the results were never anything to brag about. This image changed all of that to the point that I sold all my digital cameras and shot just film for the next few years. I was blown away by the detail and colors in the negative. I could see and almost feel the dew on the sunflower and the colors rendered exactly as I remembered it. I was hooked. I also now lived in a town with a local lab (shout out to Sharps photo in Eau Claire, WI) that could do 1 hour turnaround for developing / scanning of any film format, even 220! This unlocked a whole world of possibilities and a the next step in my photographic journey.

Over the following years I averaged a roll of medium format every two weeks and my negatives were starting to pile up. I was shooting and seeing everything with a different perspective and how it would render on medium format. On my days off, we would load up in the car and go on day adventures to photograph around our area. My daughter has thousands of images on negatives with her in them from that time. Somehow during this, I found a local listing on Craigslist of portra in 220. I snagged over 50 rolls for $2 a roll. That right, two dollars a roll! My last film order recently in 2024 for a 35mm roll of portra 400 was roughly $14 each. That’s a big difference. I was fortunate enough to shoot every last one of those over the course of that time.

So, why is this important or matter? To me it’s important to always remember how you got to the place you are today. If it wasn’t for that curiosity to pick up the camera that day, walk across the road of our house to photograph that morning, I do not know if this chapter in my life would have happened. This one image did it for me and over 12 years later, I am still fond of it. During this time, we also blossomed a love for the outdoors. Rain, snow, sunshine, cold, hot, we would find an excuse to get outside and be in nature. The simplicity of it all was beautiful. This was also right at the time before social media took off to what it is today. It formed a lot of our families values and love for adventure that we still enjoy today.