It’s been a while since I shot on anything other than 6x7 but a new(ish) relationship that is blossoming and two boys exploding into manhood made me realise that so much of what is the most rewarding in life is passing me by without a visual record. So I did the only thing any pretentious middle class twat with photographic pretensions would do. I bought a Leica MP. I tried 35mm digital, but I just couldn’t bring myself to take the damn thing anywhere. It just seemed so, well, fruitless and unprofitable.

My pretensions palpably punished me however when trying to get to grips with loading and unloading film in the Leica MP. Considering it is designed to be mechanically perfect and operationally simple I managed to make a right hash of it. First school boy error was spending a few hours shooting a roll without realising I’d failed to load it correctly and the film was not advancing. The second was believing I’d fully unwound the film only to find the film stretched naked before the void as I opened the back.

Fearing the worst, i.e. the best frames were likely the ones entirely lost to electromagnetic radiation, I optimistically developed the roll and was rewarded with the serendipity of a wonderful light leak on the two best frames. Sometimes the rewards are oblique, unanticipated and entirely the result of school boy error.