Sometimes, a little flash of beauty is all you need.

I was much more careful when I spooled this bit of Focal Color 100 (expired 1982) into the Metropolis paper, making sure it was all even, and starting with the free end and taping up last.

The film is horribly bowed, so the scans are darker in the center, as the film is farther away from the light source (these were scanned with the Pixl-Latr on a Kaiser Slimline Plano light table—resulting in images with a brighter and color shifted central swath. And, in hindsight, the focus was off.

And after the fun I had with the expired Kodachrome, I didn’t have high hopes.

But then I hit a series of pictures, close up with some fall color…

Oh my…

I let out an audible gasp of delight, almost as if all the repeated failures and disappointments of 2020 were wiped away.

Sometimes a bit of beauty is all you need. Alhamdulillah.


Happy New Year! May 2021 bring more joy, peace, fascination, and beauty to you and yours than any previous year.

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