Smile, Say Cheese, and then Wait a Week or so…

Ah, the Thrill of Waiting for your Photos to be Developed

Childhood memories: Waiting for your film to be ready at the drive-up Fotomat booths

I drove my son to the airport tonight so he could visit his girlfriend who is summering on the west coast.

He was all excited because he was going to take photos with “real film.”

Mom, he said, it is so exciting waiting for your pictures to come back.

Really? Tell me about it.

I told him about the little photo huts--the #Fotomats--that lived in the parking lots of the shopping centers where I grew up in New York. You dropped off your film there, or at the drugstore, and within a week you got your pictures back! 

There really was nothing more exciting than getting back a roll of film. If someone’s eyes were closed, oh well, that’s the way that memory would go into the photo album, because it was very rare to take more than one photo of any composition. 

When “doubles” came into existence, it was such a gift. You kept one complete set for yourself, then carefully divvied up the doubles based on who was in them, or who was crushing on someone in them.

When I was in my mid-20s--just a tad older than my son is now--a few BFFs and I took a cruise to Mexico. We spent the day in port in Key West on the route home. While other cruisers sipped pina coladas and souvenir shopped we ran to the local photo shop to take advantage of the new “1-hour Photo” craze and marvelled that we were able to view our vacation photos while we were still on vacation!  

Nowadays, as we clean out our parents and grandparents houses, some of those film doubles are coming back to us. 

I don’t know if using film again has caught on with many of the 20-somethings. They are doing it with a twist; he buys film that has been “pre-exposed.” When your photos come back they contain rainbow-hued splashes of color. Kind of cool. I googled it, and there is a whole new lexicon. 

He was never an excessive snapper of photographs, but, he said, when using film he takes fewer photos. And he is more deliberate about composing his shots. 

There is certainly a lot to be said for that!