New Year Adventures (and Failures) in Point & Shoot

We are two weeks into 2024, and I'm still riding the high of the new year and the (artificial) blank slate that comes with it. My planner is getting daily use with no empty pages to shame me yet, and my tarot card-of-the-day practice is still going strong. I've been feeling a push of creative energy, and my last few tarot pulls have been calling for me to lean into the possibility. For me, this looks like a lot of different things: blogging more regularly, restarting my book journaling habit, finishing up my embroidery projects, and most recently, picking up film photography.

The motivation to get into film photography comes from a desire to memorialize my dogs (and my life) in physical photo albums so that I can have them with me forever, instead of losing them to the cloud or to some backup from three phones ago that I no longer have access to. There are photos from my teenage years and from my early twenties that I can no longer find, and I have no idea where they went. There are photos from when we first got Luna—when she was three months old!—that are no longer on my phone, and I have no idea where they are. Meanwhile, every time I go back to my grandparents' house, I see photo albums dating back to the 1980s—before I ever existed—documenting their lives, and I want to bring that kind of permanence and recollection into my own life.

I decided I wanted to mess around with a simple point and shoot camera first, just to get my feet wet, before trying to get to know my likely-more-complicated SLR. So I loaded a roll of film (which, yes, I had to watch a YouTube video for) and started shooting pictures of my dogs. To be clear: I did read the manual for my Nikon Fun Touch 5. But it's not like there were many instructions—it is, after all, a point and shoot camera. You point, and you shoot. That's supposed to be the beauty of the thing.

So imagine my surprise when I get my scans back from the film lab only to find that all of my photos were blurry and out of focus. (Hilariously and tragically, the one photo that did turn out fine was the one my sister took of me.) How am I screwing up a point and shoot?! I have no idea. There is one shutter button. I lightly press on it to trigger the autofocus, as the manual suggests, and then I hold it down to take the photo. I don't mess with the flash because that seems to be automatic too. I keep looking up point and shoot tips online, but again there doesn't seem to be much guidance since the premise of the camera is that it's supposed to be easy.

Needless to say, my first foray into film photography was a bust. But it wasn't all a loss. Blurry as they may be, there are things I can still appreciate about how the photos turned out. I love how nostalgic everything looks on film, and I'm entertained by the process of figuring out how to operate this damn camera so I can document my dogs' lives (and eventually other subjects) as keepsakes for the future.