A Passion For Flashin’

When I was fifteen, my Mum bought me a Polaroid camera. I loved it. Suddenly I went from this shy little wall flower to a girl who was constantly in your face trying to get you from the best angle so a square little disk of history would come shooting out of the mouth of my machine. I was never allowed to touch my Dad’s SLR camera as a little girl (even though Little Bean was the accident prone one and not me) so I used to just lovingly stroke the strap which I still remember as being green and grey, and dream of all the creations I could make. I’ve always been a bit like that you see. They say that you either use the right or left side of your brain (I forget which way round it is) and that one is creative and the other is analytical; well I use the creative side a bit much. In fact, I think that the analytical side withered and died a long time ago, due to my neglect. Saying that though, one of the guys at work gave up a long time trying to show me how to do a clever excel graph that ports information from all sorts of places and then puts it in a dynamic chart with a drop down menu.  I had a look at it again the other day and nearly gave him a heart attack when I presented him with my fantastic graph, that I had finally understood after literally hours of peering at my computer and uttering.. “eh??”.

But back to the camera. Once I was in possession of this, I was delighted. I took photos of everything I could find, popping up from nowhere and photographing my family. I still have a selection of eight photos that I took of my first boyfriend looking perplexed at what I was doing, and they still make me laugh. My favourite thing was waiting to watch the inky shapes appear out of nowhere, forming silhouettes out of the darkness of the shot like evolution. I loved it.

This is potentially what made me choose to study photography at A level. I was enthralled by the entire process and would spend hours with my friend Jo in the darkroom watching the shapes develop from white to through grey to black; pulling them out of the chemicals at just the right moment or risking losing the shots forever into a murky grey grave.

Nowadays you can’t get cheap Polaroid films but I still have that massive old camera in its box, gathering dust as a reminder of something that brought me endless happiness.

Was there something that drove your passion? Do you still have it?

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

The Byronic Man is my metaphorical three French hens. His dry wit never fails to put a grin on my face and I am often found uttering “right? RIGHT!” at some of his posts. He is truly one great writer. Go read!

My two calling birds were:Brooke & McKenzie

And my partridge in a pear tree was: The Redneck Princess

The post I think you should revisit of mine today is: The Squirrel all about the day that I saved the squirrel from my Dad.

Hope you have all made a dent in your Christmas shopping!

Belle xx