Richmond on Film--December 2025

My first roll of film had a fraught journey. I made pretty much every mistake I could've made. But I was able to get the film extracted from my (now damaged) camera at a lab and against all odds the photos came out okay.

Here is part one of the photos I got developed--I took these while I was in my hometown for the holidays. This post and part two will essentially be a photo journal with context for the images.

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My first ever film photo! Overexposed and with a smudge that I assume is a light leak on the right side, of course. This is a picture of the bed frame in my room at my dad's house. When my dad moved houses after my mom's death, he asked me to switch bed frames with him. This is the side of the bed she used to sleep on. My dad says the finish is worn away because she used to fiddle with her wedding ring and it scraped against the wood. I always assumed it was because she sat up in bed with her hair wet.

A close friend of my family decorated a whole room in pinks and greens to match this Mah Jongg set. The game has apparently become a popular pastime in her social circles. Pictured going clockwise from the lower right: My family friend, my two aunts, and my family friend's mother in law.

From Urban Dictionary: "Stooping–Post covid economic term given to street scavenging for household goods. See also freeganism

People throw out perfectly good stuff and neighbors can pick them up off the street. It’s basically what people have always done, but now it’s on Instagram."

Used in a sentence: The Fan, the neighborhood where my dad lives, has lots of great opportunities for stooping.

My dad pointed out this car in his neighbor's front yard and said it's the same model as the first car he ever drove. Only–as he likes to remind us every time he talks about it–his was "shit brown."

I went back to one of the neighborhoods I grew up in to walk around this little park we used to call "the trenches." As kids we probably didn't register that these are preserved confederate trenches from the Civil War. We just thought it was a cool place to play and ride our bikes. Evidently kids today still have the same idea, since I found these tire tracks and a makeshift ramp made from old bricks.

Whilst exploring I also found this Nerf bullet, more evidence that this is still a popular spot for kids. This is the one photo I edited for color correction, since the initial scan I got back came out very blue.

This photo came out terribly, probably because I was shooting on low ISO film and sitting in the back of the theatre and snapping it very quickly without stabilizing the camera on anything so as not to disturb anyone. But I wanted to archive it here for sentimental reasons.

This is the organ at my favorite local movie theater, The Byrd. The theater's over 90 years old and it's always semi-crumbling whenever I'm back in town, so every time I see a movie there I'm worried it'll be the last time. There are lots of photos of the inside and I'm sure the theater is in good hands, but I wanted to have my own (poorly taken) photo just in case. Hopefully I get the chance to take a better one.

I took a number of photos whilst drunk on New Year's Eve that I will not share online. This is the only one of those photos that isn't blurry beyond recognition–Taken at a friend of a friend's house party.

While walking home from the party, I ate shit on a sidewalk and dented the side of my camera, not realizing until later that the dent would prevent me from lifting the mechanism that opens the camera back. I just sent the camera out for repairs. I really hope it's reparable.

Seeing these photos, I wish I had shot a full roll of film while in Richmond. The next half of the roll and part two of this photo journal was shot in Virginia Beach.