Born in the twilight of an era - this phenomena leaves you with a twisted sense of nostalgia and a crude set of half-baked skills, longing for the calm of a pre-9/11 childhood, where the internet wasn’t the sure to be the destruction of modern society, cell phones were cool but not life-sucking, cinema was still art, and playing Snake or Frogger on a floppy disk was the shit.

Born on the fine edge of a turn for the strange is where Timothy McVeigh & Seinfeld co-exist. It’s where the faded memories of a less trampled natural world reside. And it’s when life was on film.

These were the first years of my existence, and they very quickly came to include a camera in my hands. Few objects caught my attention as a kid like cameras and guitars - and, for some reason, the garbage truck. Of the many negatives that would fill my later childhood, the film negatives of the early portion would impress their silhouettes into my mind in perpetuity.

But, akin to the happy memories of a household made whole, my time with film was magically brief, fleeting, and would become faded like film in a hot car.

The digital world was fast approaching, and by the time I was ready to take a serious artistic approach to photography as a teenager, digital was the clearcut future. The explicitly clear (and very expensive) future.

I am so good at being poor.

Many decades previous, my grandfather - a man of fine taste, and oft-questionable purchases - had purchased a Pentax Spotmatic SLR with a top-of-the-line Super Takumar 50mm f1.4 lens. Long short, I learned how to adapt this vintage lens to my modern digital Canon and the signature of my photographic work was born. “So, Ash, what’s your fucking point?”

Point is, I’ve been shooting manual for my entire photographic career with all the convenience of digital shortcuts. And when it comes to a challenge, I want all the analog smoke.

With the purchase of a Pentax 67 medium format and a massive collection of 35mm SLR cameras, I have re-dedicated the next chapter of my career to film. There will be a massive amount to learn, new techniques to develop, and a slew of fuck ups to be made.

Join the adventure.