In July, I went on vacation with my wife, Casey, and a group of friends to the south of France for a wedding, and then to Barcelona, Spain, and I was stuck with a self-made dilemma.
My job, as I’ve mentioned before, is primarily that of a photojournalist. This means that day in and day out, I’m lugging around two heavy cameras and four lenses, taking thousands of photos a month. In July alone (with a week off for said vacation), I edited and captioned 556 photos The Item.
So how does a photographer go on vacation to take a break from being a photographer, you ask?
Kick it old school, of course!
I grabbed my trusty Nikon FG-20 35mm film camera from 1984, 28mm and 50mm lenses, and two rolls of Fujifilm 400 color film (36 exposures each) and threw them in my luggage.
In my day job, there’s so much pressure to get that perfect moment that tells the story I’m covering, and with memory cards that can hold 1,400 images in each camera, I find myself shooting way more images than I need because I never have to think about running out of space. But with film, you only have a finite amount of exposures and I had to make 72 photos last the entire trip.
And that’s exactly what I did. For me, the photo vacation came from being able to slow down and take my time with each image I made. I’d wait for the perfect moment and the perfect scene, often just holding the camera up to my eye and analyzing every detail I could see in the frame and taking in the whole scene before committing to pressing the shutter button. (On a side note, hearing the crisp sound of the shutter and the mechanical whir as I advance the film is something that will always make film cameras superior to digital in my mind.)
The worst part about shooting film on vacation was the constant worry that I’d have committed to this and not have any photos to show for it. I took my film out to have it hand-inspected by the TSA to avoid damage from the X-rays and there was the ever-present fear that the film would be overexposed, underexposed, or damaged because I couldn’t have it hand-checked when leaving Barcelona. And then having to mail it to the Darkroom in California to have it developed and scanned. The anxiety was killing me and I was constantly refreshing my email, waiting to receive the download link to my scans on an hourly basis.
When that email finally came through, all of that anxiety was washed away. Every image from the trip was there, captured in a warmth that only film can produce. From a miniseries of street art in Barcelona, to the stunning view of vineyards from our Airbnb in France, candids from the wedding, and the breathtaking Sagrada Família, I couldn’t be happier with the photo vacation I took.
