I recently moved the location of my home office, and with the transition comes the customary “stumbling upon things I forgot I still had.” In this particular case, I found a stash of old 4x5 transparencies that I shot in college. I took a large format camera class during my junior year of school, and the class required us to choose a project that we could pursue throughout the semester, while still learning the skills it took to work a behemoth 4x5 view camera.

My project was a series of images of the Pulaski Skyway, a steel structure highway that connects Newark, NJ with the entrance of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. The imposing structure can be seen from many vantage points, most of which in 1988 were a rag tag collection of litter strewn riverside docks, shipping warehouses, dead end industrial streets, and a place where you might find a real-life version of a Sopranos body dump occurring. Now imagine me wandering around with a huge, expensive camera that required me to focus underneath a dark cloth, completely vulnerable to a whack on the back of the head. Early morning in 1980s Jersey City, no one would hear me scream.

I am amazed looking at these images 32 years later. I am sure much of that landscape has changed, or maybe some of it looks exactly the same today. But what I find impressive is the 4 x 5 transparencies themselves. Beautiful Kodak Ektachrome! The color still looks fantastic. A quick scan and a tweak in Lightroom and this photo looks as good (or even better) than the day it was exposed. I didn’t put in the effort to remove the abundant dust from the digital file, but it is an amazing testament to the quality of shooting film that this image still exists today.