I sometimes get a feeling like I really want to create something.
I want to produce sharper scans of my photos. I want to get better colour. I want to calibrate my display so I know they'll look right elsewhere. I want to find qualities in the photos I'm unsure about. I want to capture more of what I see in my head but cannot find. I want to use my better understanding of the process to go back over older images and pull out detail that I have never seen but was always there, on a strip of film for ten years.
I have everything I need to do all of this.
I want to cut plywood, learn to build something. Put together improvised shelves and better organisation and make them perfectly to spec for their purpose and nothing else, with imperfections and a record of choices and mistakes all present. I can't find a perfect means for vinyl storage, but I can buy wood and a tape measure and and and
I don't have the tools, space, and freedom to modify where I live to do this. I dream of studio space, bench saws and pillar drills and workbenches. Everything I make for work ultimately becomes magnetism in a bunker in the desert. If no one has that web page open, it doesn't exist. Cut wood is as real as the splinters and paint splatters.
Shooting film can straddle each of these worlds. That strip of frozen light and chemistry was there at the moment the image was captured and exists in perpetuity, even if it's in a box in a drawer. The quality of image that is shared will improve over time as better tools are made to digitise. In working on and editing film photos I am shaping a physical object in a digital space. That will have to do for now.