One roll of film on the longest day
Every year I tell myself I will do something to mark the solstice, and most years I forget until about four in the afternoon. This year I planned ahead: one roll of colour film, thirty-six exposures, spread from sunrise to sunset.
The camera is a secondhand fixed-lens rangefinder from the late seventies that I bought for very little at a church sale. Its light meter works if you tap it, the focus is by guessing distances, and it is light enough to forget in a jacket pocket. That last part is the main reason I use it.
The rules were simple. No more than two frames per hour, so that the roll would last the day. No reshooting. If I missed something, it stayed missed.
Sunrise was at 5:12. I was up for it, mostly out of stubbornness, and took the first frame from the back step: the hedge, the neighbour's roof, a sky going from grey to apricot. Then coffee.
The middle of the day was harder. The light was high and flat, and nothing looked like much. I ended up photographing small things instead: the shadow of the bike on the garage wall, a bowl of early cherries, a bumblebee asleep inside a foxglove. It is a good lesson in itself. When the big picture is dull, look closer.
With only thirty-six chances, you start editing before you press the shutter. That is the whole value of it for me.
The evening was easy. Long, warm light from the west, the kind of light that makes everything look like a memory already. I walked down to the river and used my last eight frames on the path, the water, a fisherman packing up, and finally the sun dropping behind the hills at 9:04.
I sent the roll off the next week. Of thirty-six frames, about twenty are fine, five are good, and one, the sleeping bee, I like a great deal. Two are badly out of focus, which is what happens when you guess "three metres" for something that is clearly one and a half.
The scans live in a folder on my desktop now, but the prints are what I actually look at. I have pinned the bee above my desk.