For the past few weeks, I've been going nuts over the Instax instant photos, and even considered getting a Fuji Instax 90, which lets you take all kinds of artistic control over the imagery.

Yeah, well...that's not what I ended up getting.

I decided to go back to my roots all together so I snagged a Minolta X-700 35mm film camera with a 50mm f/1.7 lens and a Vivitar 28-90 f/2.8-3.5 lens on eBay.

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Granted, the X-700 wasn't my first film camera, but it was the one I fell in love with. This will be my 3rd one, but the first one for me in 10+ years. I also picked up some color and b/w film from Adorama.

So why did I change my mind about which camera to get?

I was originally very excited about getting a new camera to shoot instant photos, but this made me think hard about the concept of instant gratification. This is an experience I already get with my digital gear. In fact, while I am fascinated with instant film photos and have been having fun with it, the images really aren't that fantastic. They're great for what they are, but even with a bit more creative control, it's really not much more than a $150 toy. Don't get me wrong, I'll probably still eventually get one, but for now that's not the film experience I'm craving.

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First, I'm going to run a roll of cheap color through it to test it out. If all is good, then I've got a project I think I'm going to use it for. It's not terribly original, honestly. Just a 365-day project to take a picture per day with it for a year. The difference in my project comes with the timing of developing the rolls, which is the meaning behind the name:

"Memories On Moratorium"

Most people who take up projects like this usually do 1 of 2 things:

• They'll either shoot their roll each month, then at the end of the month get it developed and/or printed and build up the collection all year, month by month.
• Or they'll shoot all year and then develop everything at the end of the year all at once.

Mine is going to be a bit different.

Instead of developing when I'm done shooting at the end of the year, I'm going to continue shooting and wait yet another year before developing the previous year's film.

So, let's say January 1, 2017 I started shooting the very first roll of this ongoing project(I didn't, but this is just for sake of breaking it down), and I shoot 12 rolls of film all year - mixture of color and b/w.

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When January 1, 2018 rolls around, I don't develop anything. I just keep shooting and continue into the following year, making sure each month that I'm marking every roll with the month/year they belong in.

Then, when January 1, 2019 finally arrives, all the rolls for 2017 finally get developed, and from that point forward I develop yearly but always 1 year behind - that's the moratorium, the delay.

So why do it that way? Why wait a year?

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First of all, aside from instant photos like Instax or Polaroid, I haven't shot film since probably 2005. That's 12 years. I've noticed something about myself that I think my generation has forgotten and lost, and that the current generation doesn't have enough direct experience with to really appreciate. And that's an overabundance of instant gratification, especially with the images we capture.

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We now live in a world where not only can you take an image and see it literally instantaneously, but we can take an unlimited number of them and just as instantly share them with anyone on the planet who's paying attention. It's a part of the future we dreamed about for decades.

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I feel as though it has come with the unforeseen side-effect of forgetting what true nostalgia feels like. Right now, when people go back through their images they took with their phone, the most nostalgic experience they can get out if is "Hey I remember taking that." And that's because they've already seen it. They're nostalgic about seeing the picture, not necessarily about the moment captured within it.

My goal is to put a year between the last photo taken for the project and the development of its film rolls so that when we see the images for the first time, they're brand new all over again. We've had a year to age, to change. We can truly appreciate the recurrence of those captured moments because we waited so long to see them. They seem more precious to me that way. Nostalgia; baked to perfection.

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