Two Rolls of Portra, Wasted on a Fence

Portra 400 is expensive enough that using a third of a roll on a fence should feel reckless. It didn't. The light that afternoon was hitting the chain-link at an angle where every diamond of wire threw its own tiny shadow, stacking into a moiré pattern that shifted every time I moved three inches to the left.

I've since learned this is called a "camera glitch" by people who post reels about it. At the time I just knew that the fence looked like it was breathing.

The scans came back soft, a little underexposed in the shadows the way Portra gets when you meter for the highlights and forget the rest of the frame exists. I don't mind. There's a version of this photo that's technically correct and a version that's this one, and only one of them made my hands cold standing at that fence for twenty-five minutes waiting for a cloud to move.