A good number of my posts from the past couple of months have included the #we35 tag, and I’ve discussed the project previously with the longest explanation here.

It is a collaborative project and the person organizing it hands out assignments every month. You are free to do other work within the project but the monthly assignments give us all a shared focus of sorts. The February Assignment was to shoot either a roll of film or shoot digitally as clsoe to film as possible. That meant

• 36 exposures, no extras, no do-overs;
• limited or no post-processing (B&W conversion was allowed either in-camera or after)
• shoot in a single ISO value (this was my idea)

Once you finished, we were instructed to create a contact sheet showing all 36 shots. A we35 co-captain created a digital layout for everyone to use that look pretty cool. But I had to go and do my own real film thing.  I’ve never ordered a true contact sheet before. yes, I’ve gotten those small 4×6 prints that have every shot on the roll in a super-tiny thumbnail, but a real contact sheet is an entirely different animal. It is sort of a large photograph of your negatives, rendered positive. The film marking and sprockets are all there, and it is huge. Mine came on 10×12 sheets.  Nor are they cheap.  The lab I used charges $12 for the sheet. But I’m not complaining. It was a joy to get them. You can see one of them above.

Turning to my project, beyond using real film, I had to decide how to approach my 3-dozen shots. My first line of thought was to either go out and shoot what caught my eye, or to pick a theme.  My first theme idea was to stay in my neighborhood and shoot small statuettes in people’s front yards. As my mind continued to meander I thought about pizza parlors. My initial idea was to shoot pizza parlors spread throughout the city, getting 7-8 in each borough. But the coldest February in decades made that seem very unappealing. Staying closer to home seemed easier, but then I sort of combined the ideas – what about pizza parlors just from Queens, or even my neighborhood.  Now there are not three dozen pizza joints in my immediate neighborhood, but there are that many, and even a couple dozen more, within a 2 mile radius of my home.

My next decision was whether to shoot color or black and white. I chose color, and used Kodak Gold 400 film. But I also sort of cheated. True to the spirit of the assignment I firmly resolved to use that roll as my project, but I also shot an additional roll of Kodak T-Max 400 film at the same time using the same model camera, a Contax T3. Even within the 2 mile radius it was a bit of a chore to travel around to get these images, and I wanted both color and black and white shots to come from my efforts. I will probably show the black and white versions in the future, but for now I’m starting with the official color versions. In addition of the 2 film shots I took of each location, I also made an iPhone shot to record the locations. Here is the map of the 37 pizza parlors that made the project.

Did I just say 37? Yes, well with real 35mm film you often get more than the official number of exposures on a roll. Here I got 37.

What follows are the first 6 images from the roll in order.  Once a week for the next few weeks I will post another half dozen until the set is fully published.