Frugal Film Project August 2025 - The Carts
You may or may not have noticed - I made no blog posts about my Frugal Film Project for the months of June and July. I had to take a break from it because I was super busy shooting several events for the Springfield Arts Council and the John Legend Theater. What little time I had to shoot outside of that work found me having little to no motivation to shoot anything creative for myself. Spending so much time behind the camera and editing meant that the last thing I wanted to do was pick up a camera for fun!
Now that those busy months are over with, I managed to get out with my trusty Canonet QL19 and shoot my August roll of Fuji 400 consumer film. My theme this month was carts. Shopping carts to be more precise. They are one of those things that are everywhere and because of that, I rarely notice them or spend any time looking at them. I guess I could go on and on about them being a symbol of capitalism and greed, yadda yadda yadda. But that’s really not why I was shooting them. I wanted to take a mundane subject and find a way to capture and elevate it. For this challenge I also imposed a limitation - no moving or staging the carts. They had to be shot where and how they were found.
I did find out a few interesting things.
First, the time to photograph carts is early in the morning. This is when they are most scattered and have not yet been gathered up by the store workers. Also the amount of annoying cars and people are much lower during that time.
Second, even in the early mornings when no one is out and about, I still found a way to have someone yell at me and tell me I can’t photograph in a parking lot. I won’t expand on that here so let’s just leave it at me saying that people sometimes just need to mind their own business and check their rude comments before they say them.
And Third, if I see an opportunity to shoot something, do it right then. There was a cart that was in an interesting position that I saw while photographing another group of carts, and I told myself that it was far out in the lot and could wait until I finish what I was doing. By the time I got to it, a man parked right next to it, got out of his car, grabbed the cart, and began rolling it toward the store to go shopping. The nerve of him! :)
Anyway, below are some of my favorite shots from the roll. Click on the first image to expand and scroll through the rest.
Well, what do you think? None of these are award-winning for certain, but I tried to get some different angles and change things up a bit for this project. I think the Fuji 400 (Ultramax?) film and the colors it has are great for this kind of work. I enjoyed looking at something that I typically ignore, and this experience may cause me to look at other things in the same way.
As always, thanks for reading!
Jeremy