I thought that at this point I should write a short note explaining why some of the photos on this blog are so bad.

The elephant in the room is that I’m just not that good at photography. I’ve got better over time, but its been a slow haul. I’d like to think I’ve improved, and certainly I’m not posting my worst stuff, but there always seems to be another priority.

Secondly, many of the photos in some upcoming posts were taken on film nearly twenty years ago. I can hardly remember that time, but I do remember the long wait between taking the shot and waiting for the negative to be developed. It’s actually tough to get better when the feedback loop is so open.

Those shots that I took on film have had to be scanned and tinkered with to make them useable. That means that there’s some grain in the images and sometimes they’re not as sharp as they could be. I could probably try to make them more like digital photos, but I like the imperfections. It’s my version of yellowing film stock from the 60s.

A handful of the photos here weren’t taken by me. Some have been taken by family members or other people known to me in order to stand in for situations where my originals are lost or destroyed.

The next few posts refer to a period in 2002 when I was travelling in Eastern Europe with my last film camera. After that I switched to digital. There aren’t as many shots as I’d like (film is expensive), and some of them aren’t great, but I still think it’s interesting to see what I cared about photographing more than 15 years ago.