Melinda Holland Photography

I’ve had this idea floating around in my brain for a while now. Probably for the last 2 years, actually. I’ve got thousands of photos floating around on my hard drives, many of which have never been seen by the public. And I keep meeting new people who are not familiar with my work, where I come from, what I’ve shot in the past. So I thought it’d be cool to put up a single shot from the archives and call it dumpster Archive Diving. I was gonna call it “Archive of the Week”…but then realized there was no way I could keep up a weekly pace of archives. I’d think about this idea from time to time, which photos I’d use–and then put the idea back on the shelf in my brain for a later visit.

Well, here it is. I’m actually putting up a post. So there you have it. A new series, finally coming to life.
This was my first nice portrait. I call it my “Iconic Photo.” It just has that look. This was most likely shot on Kodak Tri-X film of which I processed myself and printed in a darkroom. I learned photography on a completely manual SLR camera with no bells & whistles, using just one 35-70mm (3.5-5.6) lens for many years. If I dug around in my files, I could find the negative and probably the ISO, speed and f-stop. But going through my negs is way more time-consuming than it should be since I’ve yet to properly organize them. Good news is that they’re not dumped in shoeboxes but in 3-ring binders inside protective sleeves. They’re just not dated, titled and all that good stuff. My guess is I probably shot this in 2002. This was shot in an old strip mall about 2 miles from my home town in Texas for an assignment involving stop-motion in my Photo I class at the University of North Texas.