Another roll, another group of photos that I am not thrilled with 18 years after I took them. What I am finding out is that I wasn’t great about keeping my negatives in order in high school. I wish I could jump back in time to give a brief PowerPoint presentation to my younger self on the importance of being organized in all things you do in life. Now I just have to live with my mistakes.
This roll isn’t all bad. It’s nice to see some faces as I remember them from high school. Plus, my dogs make an appearance but neither of the photos are quite what I want them to be. I really like the one of the pooch facing the camera, I just wish I had metered the camera better for her and not for the overall scene.
There is a group of photos in this roll that must have been a study in motion blur. I don’t recall what the specific assignment was but I know I needed to photograph a moving target. Well, my subject for this photograph is my best friend, and he’s been anything but a moving target over the years.
Geoff and I know we can trace our friendship back to kindergarten, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised it if went back even further. Like a lot of my friends, he floated in and out of the picture throughout school but he and I never drifted apart. I think part of it helps that he lived around the block from me and if I cut through the yards, he really was less than half a block away.
Over the years, Geoff has played many roles in my life. Friend, questing partner, co-mall rat, wing-man, teacher, student, best man, co-worker, best friend, and everything in between. While I was off in Ukraine for the Peace Corps, Geoff made a point to call me every week that he could while he was on his lunch break. He’d update me on what was going on back home and I’d talk him through my antics. The time difference usually meant while he was eating lunch, I was sitting down for dinner. None of my other friends made even 1/100 that effort.
These photos of Geoff on the run are so obviously posed and staged when I look at them. I know exactly where they were taken and I can tell by how Geoff is carrying himself that we were working the camera together. They aren’t great, but I’ve always found that following a moving subject to be extremely difficult for me.
In recent years, Geoff is really the only friend I keep in regular contact with. For me, it feels like we’re moving at the same pace and have similar approaches to life. It’s refreshing that I do not have to try to be any more or any less than I am around him. I have other friends, but I’m really struggling to think of one that lets me fully be myself (wife excluded).
These days, we live about an hour apart. I’m hardly able to run out my back door and down the block to see him. Every time we get together, we remark on how we meant to do it sooner but life happens. All that being said, we aren’t deterred. There isn’t ever that feeling that we’re putting in more effort than seems fair. And again, I cannot say that for most people.
Geoff and I have ramped up our conversations lately. I’ve known for a while that he is looking for a new job and it just so happened that my office had an opening for my counterpart. I knew Geoff was the right fit for the role, though I might have needed to convince him only a little. Since he formally applied, I’ve been answering every question he has about what we do in the hopes that we might get to spend more time together. Honestly, the prospect of working with Geoff would help me forget some of the things I don’t care about with my job. I hope he finds out soon.
This isn’t the first time and it is far from the last time Geoff shows up in these old rolls. I recently came across a pile of negatives I didn’t know that I had and sure enough, Geoff makes a few appearances over the years. Though, if you made it this far then I doubt that is much surprise.
