I should be writing today, but the sunshine and breeze and blooming dogwoods are making that really difficult. So instead, I’m sitting on the patio with my laptop, pretending to work but really looking at some film scans and staring off into the distance.

I’m looking at it this way—there are only so many days each year when the temperature is perfect, the skies are clear and blue, and most importantly, there are no mosquitoes. So I’ll take advantage while I can.

On the plus side, all that daydreaming resulted in an exciting new idea for the current WIP. I’ll call that a win.

Is spring making it difficult for you to concentrate?
What do you do when nice weather beckons—
buckle down and work or give in and go play?

In one of my works in progress, the protagonist is a photographer who uses a vintage twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera.

Back before I switched to digital photography, I dabbled in TLR film photography with a vintage Ricoh Diacord. When I started writing about operating a TLR, I realized I needed to brush up on the details.

How do you set the exposure again? And is the image on the ground glass reversed, or reversed and upside down?  

So I dusted off my Diacord, loaded a roll of Portra 400, made 12 exposures, and shipped the film off to the lab, all in the name of research. Then the scans came back. This photo of the dog of mischief was near the end and was my very favorite shot from the roll.

Loki, the dog of mischief, relaxing in the back yard on a hot day and much more interested in squirrels and his stick than in posing for a photograph.

I had forgotten how much I love the look of TLR photographs—the square format, the detail, the depth of field—nothing else is quite like them.

This was my first time shooting color film in the Diacord. My previous experiments were all done in black and white, which I still love, but I was surprised by how much I liked color TLR photographs. There’s a new roll in the camera and it’s over half full, so expect to see more film photos in the very near future.

Oh, and if you were wondering, the image is reversed left to right in
the Diacord, making composing an image a bit of a challenge.