The Film Diary

March 1, 2026 - The First Click

I have been obsessed with process photography since attending a lecture a few weeks ago on Daguerrotypes and the early days of the medium. This week, on a lark, I dug out a box of my grandfather's belongings from the hall closet. Upon my father's passing in 2024 I inherited a number of old cameras, mostly digital and most from the late 90s. Included in the box was a 35mm Praktiflex FX camera my grandfather had purchased while serving in Germany during and after WWII. In 1949, camera shops in the newly-formed East Germany sold this Soviet-made (and stamped with "made in Germany" - in English) primarily to American soldiers as a souvenier. 

Resurrecting this camera,I took it down to my local shop so they could give me the all-clear to start dropping film into it. They'd never seen anything like it before, and had never seen a camera with the viewfinder on top, meant to be shot from waist height. After picking out a handfull of rolls of film and receiving a demo of how to load it (I hadn't loaded a film camera since high school, which was longer ago than I tend to admit), I was on my way. A few hours of experimental yet boring pressing of the shutter in my neighborhood yielded pexposures of every color, composition and range of light that I could find. One roll of black and white and another of color film later, I handed my canisters to the employee at the development counter and came back home to load even more film for even more experimentation while I wait for my results to develop.