Amalgamation

You may find the title of this photo intriguing, and for good reason, because at face value, it doesn’t exactly make sense, but I can assure you that it is actually quite fitting.

An amalgamation is "The action, process, or result of combining or uniting," according to the New Oxford American Dictionary.

You see, it all started in 1977, ten years before I was born. That’s the year Nikon released the Nikon FM, the camera in which I used to capture this photograph.

The second piece of the puzzle is the film. The film itself was a roll of Kodak Ektachrome, which expired twenty-five years ago. So even the film was manufactured before I was born.

As for the capturing of the actual photograph, that occurred in October 2010, but the film wasn’t processed or scanned until 2011.

But the story doesn’t end there. Kodak states that Ektachrome should be processed in E-6 chemistry, but E-6 processing is rather scarce nowadays, as practically all color film uses C-41. So I had the film cross-processed in C-41 instead. How’s that for an amalgamation!

So I guess you could say this photo has been thirty-four years in the making!