5 Frames from a mental health day

I love teaching. Working with teenagers is rewarding work… and exhausting. I see around 160-180 students per semester. It is challenging work, but I get to share the thing I love with kids every day. And I never take time off during the year. I don’t call in sick, don’t take breaks, I’m there every day. Even during COVID… never missed a day.

I just completed my tenth year of high school teaching. I teach 3 levels of painting, Advanced Placement (AP) Drawing and 2-Dimensional Design, early college Art Appreciation and early college Drawing, both for dual credit (high school and college.) That’s 6 different classes of 4 levels of fine art, quite a workload.

So, I turned 53 this year, and I decided to start taking a day for myself, every month, to do something that makes me happy. A day off with a camera, call it a mental health day, to invest more in a long-time interest of mine – photography. A grad school course in contemporary photography a few years ago re-ignited my interest in analog photography, and I began shooting film again every so often. At the end of last year, I decided to go fully analog and learn to develop and scan my own film.

The 5 frames I’m sharing are from the first mental health day I took this year. I chose a part of Dallas, Texas I’d never been to, an industrial area that is being “gentrified” as we speak. I took a drive down Caesar Chavez Boulevard just see what’s there, going all the way from downtown Dallas to where it dead ends. My camera of choice was my Asahi Pentax Spotmatic with a Super Takumar 1:3.5/28 lens that had been recently CLA’d by Eric Hendrikson. I’ve had this camera since 2002 and bought it used for $50 with 2 lenses, the matching lens hood and matching cases. The light meter still works, and the camera is incredibly reliable and well-built.

lI shot Kodak Tri-X 400 at box speed, metered with the camera, and home developed in Kodak D-76 and Ilford Stop bath and Fixer. I scanned with an Epson v600, and any adjustments were done with Adobe Photoshop. I will say adjustments were very minimal, a few I bumped up the contrast a little but that’s it. My goal is to get it right in the camera and not do a lot of “fixing.” I am learning Tri-X makes that easier to accomplish.

I want to encourage everyone to take one day a month for yourself and pour back into the thing you love to do. Keep it simple and connect with why you picked up a camera to begin with. I also want to thank everyone in this community for inspiring me to develop my own film. Do you have a mental health day you practice? Share below in the comments and thanks for reading.

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