picking and choosing (but mostly discarding)

At the end of December I will have been shooting on film (in various formats) for over two years. I think I've grown quite a bit as a photographer in that time, and one reason is that using film has changed my relationship to the each individual capture. The limits of shooting with a physical format—I have 36 exposures, or 10 exposures, or 1 sheet of film—and the expense (in either time or money) of developing those images has made me more deliberate about my shooting. And more deliberation in the act of making a capture has also made me more selective in terms of what I want to share or showcase.

A year or two ago, I would have picked a third or even half the images from a roll of 35mm to share. These days, I'm shocked if there are more than 5 or 6 that I like per roll. That's the case here. These 10 photos are pulled from 2 rolls of 36-exposures, for a "hit rate" of about 14 percent. And honestly, I could probably pare that down even further. 

It's not that the other photos are bad—although some definitely are—it's that they don't really do anything for me. 

These shots are divided roughly by time and place. This first one, of the (fake) leg in the truck was taken at the beginning of November in Charlottesville, Virginia.

I took these next three at Charlottesville's Riverview Cemetery, which is just a short walk from my apartment, and a nice place to take a stroll in the evening, as the light fades.

These two photos were taken on the Downtown Mall. I find the first just kind of creepy, and the second is the still-strong makeshift memorial to Heather Heyer, who was killed by white supremacists this summer on this particular street.

And these are a few shots from my various travels in November. The top is of the airport in Wichita, Kansas, the next two after that are storefronts in Oxford, North Carolina, and the final photo is of a shack somewhere on US-15 heading south toward Raleigh.

All of these were taken with a Leica M5 using a M-Hexanon 50mm f/2 lens and Kodak T-MAX 400. They were developed by Pro Camera in Charlottesville.