Grandbob

I only saw my grandparents twice a year growing up, but one of my strongest childhood memories is of my grandfather taking pictures with his 35mm camera. He took photos of my cousins and I playing in the pool, my parents laughing over dinner conversation, my mom and grandmother playing double solitaire... Records of the everyday, but the kind of photos you couldn't imagine not having years down the road. When I was very young, I didn't understand why he never asked us to smile at the camera or say "cheese" before he snapped a photo. As I got older, I didn't understand why he wouldn't buy a digital camera and catch up with the evolving world. Now, I use a 35mm camera, and it finally makes sense to me: feeling the weight of a real camera, manipulating the shutter speed and aperture, holding the negatives up to the light to get a miniature preview of your work... It's manual and time-consuming, but there's something magical about it that makes me never want to use a digital camera again. Using an old school camera makes me feel almost like a part to his generation, and using a camera so similar to my grandfather's makes me feel closer to him.