As I was getting ready to come back up to school for my senior year, I found some old family photos from holidays and birthdays past.

Flipping through page after page of the old disposable camera photos, now a decade or so old, I couldn’t help but notice how much character the photos held. I decided to try my hand at going old school to find that character in Penn State’s campus.

The film grain, the blurriness, the blown-out highlights, and vibrant colors of these photos were charming to me. Not a single one of them was edited after the fact. Each possesses the beauty that a simple disposable camera held within its plastic shell.

The hustle and bustle of Pattee Mall never fails, even on film.

I used my little camera over the last several weeks and shoot what I saw, an exposure at a time. Viewing campus through the lens of my disposable camera was freeing. I was able to walk and up down the pathways all across campus and shoot knowing that I couldn’t immediately see the end result on an LCD screen.

That was new for me, yet exciting. Through these photos, campus held a nostalgic quality that felt warm and inviting. These photos are reminiscent of something I would find in one of my family photo albums of a trip up north to Penn State.

A grainy sunset is my new favorite aesthetic.

Looking back at the photos and holding them in my hand some weeks later, after having them developed, I realize how excited I was to shoot them.

It brought me back to when I was a kid, going around the house snapping photos of family and friends without taking time to focus or adjust my exposure, as well as all of that other boring photo jargon. Simplicity isn’t always a bad thing.

A campus photo story isn’t complete without our squirrel friends!

No disposable film photo story would be complete without a cameo from Onward State staff writer Matthew Ogden, who’s always looking very 90s.