I enjoy the process of taking pictures. I usually try to compose an image and then take the picture with some hope the image I get will match the one I envisioned.

Back when I started with photography in the 7th grade, I was fortunate that my junior high school had a darkroom complete with enlarger. But, composing the picture was just the beginning. You had to develop the film. And that starts with learning how to unload the exposed film from your camera and wind it on a spool that goes into a light-tight can. But, you have to do this in pitch darkness so stray light won’t fog the film.  It’s done by sense of touch and could be frustrating when the film refuses to feed smoothly into the spool.

Then, you pour various chemicals into the can spinning the spool around to develop the film. When done, you open the can and take out a film strip with negatives (whites are black and blacks are white, and no, I could not afford color film or processing but those negatives show “negative” color for the three primary colors used).

Using the enlarger, you expose the print paper for a few seconds to light that you shine through the negative. This creates a negative, negative so once again black is black and white is white. But, when you turn off the enlarger light, there is no image visible on the paper. You have to take the paper and slosh it in trays of similar chemical solutions to get a print. There is magic in watching a piece of white paper slowly transform into an emerging image that finally comes into sharp focus.

The time from composing a picture to seeing the print for the first time was often several weeks as it took me awhile to shoot a roll of 12 images. I was very deliberate of what I took pictures of due to the cost of film and the labor of creating a print.

Today, with digital imaging, I get to see the picture “immediately” and I shoot many more pictures than I did with film. As with film, what I get is never quite what I saw in my mind’s eay. Sometimes its better.

Here are my favorites. And this link takes you to some more from Devin.
http://wordpress.reams.me/2012/lake-powell-2012/