As of today I have seven rolls of film waiting to be scanned. All 35mm rolls, all 36 exposures except for a single bulk-rolled short roll that just has 15 shots. So somewhere in the region of 230 pictures yet to scan.
I addition I also have three rolls that have been scanned, but not yet post-processed. Again, all 35mm, but this time two 36 exposure rolls and another short roll, which bumps the total up to around 320 images in total.
I have another 36 exposure roll in one of my cameras with perhaps two or three frames remaining, so when that is finished and developed I’m at nearly 360 photographs.
Usually my dev>scan>process workflow is much quicker, but I’ve been holding back recently, in part because I’ve had a bunch of already processed shots to upload and so wasn’t in a rush, but also because of something I saw in a YouTube video I watched a while back from Sean Tucker. The video is all about how to choose your best images and in part refers back to one of his earlier videos where he interviewed landscape photographer Rachel Talibart who explains her approach to reviewing her images.
She says that, often, after a day of photography, she returns home on a high about the pictures she’s taken and can still be tripping about the experience for some time afterwards. This mood, she says, is not the best for objectively assessing the photographs she’s taken. Because she’s still tripping on the experience, the photos will often be a disappointment and no match for the fresh memories of the experience. She also finds it very difficult to edit the photographs while still on the high.
Looking at the photos straight away distorts her appreciation of the images. She’s often looking for something very specific and can discount the images that don’t meet this preconception. As a result she can miss good pictures. However, if she looks at them later – six months, a year, two years, the good images she might have overlooked initially present themselves much more readily to her now more objective eye.
I’ve recently been looking back through older, mostly digital, images and found this to be the case, finding pictures that I did nothing with that are actually, to me at least, quite good and more than worth revisiting.
So, while I have a glut of film pictures, I’m trying to take a similar approach and waiting to scan and process them. I still have an idea what is on most of the rolls I’ve shot, but many of the individual frames have faded from memory so when I come to scan them they will appear fresh to my eye and, hopefully, I’ll be able to objectively assess them and see which are good.
This obviously comes down to my own subjectivity in terms of what I do and don’t like, but I’m looking forward to see how this technique works. At the very least, the anticipation I feel is making me very much look forward to revisiting the scenes I felt worthy of a picture back when I photographed them.
Ironically, some of the photos I have been uploading recently are more recent ones that have jumped the queue, including this slightly apt picture…
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fujifilm Acros II. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 15 August 2026.
