What Slide Film Taught Me

I started pursuing photography as a serious hobby in 1999. After wetting my feet with a few dozen rolls of print film and getting lack lustre prints from the lab, I decided to try out slide film – the one that folks at National Geographic were using. I shot my first roll of Fuji Provia at the rose garden in Santa Clara University. When I got my little box of processed and mounted slides, I laid them down on the light table at the store and peered at them with a loupe. I have never quite recovered from that visceral shock of seeing razor sharp images with rich saturated colors back-lit by a sea of white light.

Over the next 5 years, I shot thousands of rolls of slide film. I was a ruthless editor of my work. When I got back processed slides from a shoot, I kept a trashcan next to the table as I scrutinized them one by one on a lighbox and loupe. Out of a roll of 36, I usually kept just 4 or 5 and trashed the rest. I learned the constraints imposed by slide film by trial and error. Over...