In July 2020, we packed up our little camper and headed down to a lovely little campground in St. Petersburg, Florida. Fort DeSoto is actually really difficult to get into and reservations have to be made exactly 6 months from your expected arrival date. Thankfully, with some careful planning, we were able to snag a spot! It’s an absolutely stunning park, and we had an amazing time that week.

One of things I will always remember about this trip, is that this is the week that I fell in love with film. I left my digital camera at home, and only brought my trusting 35mm film camera (Canon 1V), a 50mm lens and some rolls of Fuji400h (which has since been discontinued… RIP).

I felt a little bit transported back into time before the digital era. I took photos of the kids playing on film and had to wait to get home, mail off the film and get the scans back before I knew what they looked like. It was like Christmas morning when Goodman Film Lab dropped the scans in my inbox. It was so fun and sweet to look back over all the images and relive our trip. In a world of instant gratification, this truly showed me that something are really worth the wait.

I promptly ordered prints and an album of our trip. There’s just something magical about capturing your memories on film and then preserving them in a tangible way, off a digitized screen.

This is when I fell in love with the magic of film.