Birch forest

Now I'm afraid I'm going to be nostalgic. When I started photographing with Dad's camera, it was all manual: focus, aperture, and the mechanical and satisfactory cric-cric-clack! of the film advance lever. It made a sound of vibrating springs.

Then underneath the machine was a recessed pin: you had to press it to unlock the roll where the photos you had taken were wound, and so, with the rewind lever, you could get the film back inside its dark little box, waiting for development.

However.

If instead of rewinding the whole thing you took your time and with an eye on the shot counter, you could turn the roll back just a little. And then, after another resounding criiic-clack! shooting again on the already impressed film. A double exposure, in short. Or a multiple exposure, in fact, since nothing compelled stopping at two shots.

It is exciting, some 30 years later, to shoot with a digital camera that gives that same sense of wonder and surprise, of amazement when you cast your eyes on the result. Like these birch trees, which came out of a snowy walk on Sunday, popping out of a forest I've seen a hundred times before. But which had never been so sharp.