The Second Roll

I started with a D40 and a memory card, and I gave it up for an old film camera from the eighties that cost less than a textbook. This book is not a manual and not a manifesto. It is field notes from someone who learned by doing, losing, and doing again. It will not teach you the Zone System. It will teach you what it feels like to stand in front of El Capitan with one frame left and the light going, or to open the back of the camera in a sixty-dollar heated tent at Curry Village and find fifteen frames you worked for crunched into overlapping ghosts.
The chapters follow the gear and the ground it covered: the Nikon FG-20 and the 100-day trip, Ektar 100, the one-hour photo counter at Kmart, the N80 and its AA battery lie, the F4 dying at Brookings, Toketee Falls, the last frame in the Alabama Hills at 3:30 in the afternoon, nine miles into Ice Lake with yellow eyes in the dark and a 28mm lens leaking light into every corner, the Big Stopper and the 400mm, shooting weddings on a 5D Mark III to pay for film, a $35 Canon EOS body from KEH that arrived with a roll already in it — the roll from January through August of 2020 that I still have not developed. From Kmart to DotDotson's to The Darkroom in San Clemente, to a Pacific Image scanner running in a closet and an archive of 120,000 images, one frame is all you get, whether you press once or ten times. The delay is the practice.