Fifteen Year Old Film | Emily Brunner Photography

Fifteen years ago, I took my last photos on film with no fanfare or foresight to just how much digital photography would change how we take and use photographs.  My last few photos were taken using a roll of Kodak T-max black & white 100 film shortly after I had moved from the cold winters of Chicago to the sunny beaches of Bermuda.  My husband and I made the move in the late spring of 2002 and I began using a Canon Powershot digital camera which literally fell apart many years ago.  After I started shooting with a digital camera, I never touched film again - until I discovered this undeveloped roll of film in an old camera bag just a couple of months ago.  

I suspected that the images on the film would cover my last year of living in Chicago.  I had no memory at all of the individual photos I had taken with it.  I knew that I had a real, yet unintentional time capsule from my own life, 15 years ago!  I took the film to Paoli Fotobar to have it developed and printed.  I also expected the images to be damaged from sitting in a moldy, dark and humid sub-tropical attic for 3 years.  Getting the prints back and seeing them for the first time was such a special experience!  It turned out that most of the photos were from our early days of living in Bermuda.  I expected to have many more from Chicago - I don't even remember using my old film camera in Bermuda! The most moving part of the experience was seeing a couple of photos of my cat, Tinker, who passed away early this year.  It was really sweet to see the photos of her and very sad to know these were the last new images of her that I would ever see.

I am loving how in black & white and with the grain from a film camera, some of these images look much older than they are.  The black & white images from my digital camera today are just so incredibly sharp and vibrant compared to these!  I am also really enjoying seeing brand new images from my perspective 15 years ago.   I'll have to figure out a way to leave myself another time capsule to be opened in the decades to come!