Each evening is difficult with children. Learning to sleep through the night is a skill. My Mother never acquired that skill. It’s unclear if she ever sleeps.

I woke up one morning, stumbled into Lilys room and saw this. I raced back to my bedroom, grabbed my camera and tripod and made this exposure.

Questions:

How did the mattress become disaligned with the box spring?

Why is the lamp shade off the lamp?

What is the ribbon at the foot of the bed?

How long has she been lying there sucking her thumb?

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Technical thoughts, philosophical data and photo tips:

Camera used: Canon Eos 1n. Tri-x film. Exposure unknown.

A second installment in the film vs. digital subject:

A big issue for me is the film/negative, print consideration.

I love actual photographs. I mean paper images that you can hold, bend, smell, store, sort, tear, touch and look at. They are underrated. The new meduim of photography is the LCD screen. Most (if not all) images that humanity creates at this time exist only on the hard drives and are viewed on the LCD screen. Noone makes prints.

In the old days (10 years ago) we all shot film and we all had to process that film and make prints. That was the medium, prints. If you pull out old photo albums they are full of prints. I have an album from my mission in Texas from 1992-1994. I carefully culled the hundreds of  prints from my two years and organized them and captioned  them and put them in a handsome photo album.

I like that.

And then there are negatives. When I ran Charis portrait studio we had color negatives from as early as 1955. We made new prints from those negatives all the time. The new prints were as good as new. Those negatives were 50 years old. What will become of the digital files that we are madly creating in the year 2060?

Just a question. I guess it’s fair to ask what will happen to the negatives in the year 2060 too.

More to come

-Jon Ball is a portrait photographer working and living in Boise, Idaho. His portraiture can be found on the world wide web at www.studiojonball.com.