[Leica] Some very LUG-like sentiments here

[Nathan Wajsman]

Thanks for sharing! On my recent trips I have carried the Leica M2 or the Olympus OM4T, alongside the Fuji X digital.

Cheers,
Nathan


Nathan Wajsman
photo at frozenlight.eu

http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
http://www.greatpix.eu
http://www.frozenlight.eu

Слава Україні! Героям слава!






> On 9 Apr 2023, at 22:38, Howard L Ritter Jr via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> 
> On Apr 9, 2023, at 2:55 PM, Nathan Wajsman <photo at frozenlight.eu> wrote:
>> 
>> Behind a paywall :-(
>> But I like the title. I have been taking my film cameras with me on recent trips.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Nathan
> 
> 
> Sorry, I didn’t realize that because I have a subscription. I hope WaPo won’t be too upset if I share the text.
> 
> —howard
> 
> 
> My carry-on bag is mostly filled with camera gear. As a travel writer and photographer <https://www.sebastianmodak.com/>, I have an almost obsessive need to make sure I have the equipment for any contingency: long lenses in case I spot a rare parakeet, shorter ones to make sure I get every angle on every explosive sunset. So when it came time to take my first real vacation in years, I decided I was going to leave all that gear in my closet.
> 
> I still wanted memories from the vacation, especially because it was a special one. I had just gotten married, and this multiday bicycling journey through Slovenia was to be Maggie’s and my honeymoon. I wanted to limit how many photos I took with my phone, too. This was going to be an exercise in mindfulness and being present. Besides trying to break the associations I had between photography, travel and work, I also wanted to break my habits of reaching for my phone whenever I saw something remotely interesting.
> 
> So I dove into the wild world of Facebook Marketplace, combed through a sea of scams and landed a Canon 35mm film point-and-shoot from the early 1990s. It wasn’t as cheap as it should have been, a direct result of various Kardashians being photographed with similar point-and-shoots at cool parties. It’s the size of a small brick and the shutter makes a sound not dissimilar to a truck turning into Optimus Prime, but I was happy with the find. I bought two rolls of film, dropped it all into my now eerily lightweight carry-on and we were off.
> 
> Readers of a certain age will be rolling their eyes at this point. The millennial falls for the allure of the retro chic and thinks it’s revolutionary; we’ve seen this movie before. Fair enough, but this was meant to disrupt my present, not relive the past. And it worked.
> 
> With just 72 photos in total to take over the course of two weeks, I was more selective about what I photographed. Then, the camera was back in my bag and I was back in the moment, rolling through vineyards, taking in the view alongside my new wife, watching the days disappear.
> 
> When I got the photos developed two months after coming home, flipping through them was its own joy. They weren’t perfect. A few selfies were off-kilter and overexposed. An errant eyelash on the lens meant that for ten photos, it looks like someone took to vandalizing our memories with a Sharpie. But the imperfections made them even more accurate snapshots of fleeting moments as they really were.
> My favorite photo from that trip was taken in the village of Stanjel after a long day of cycling. Locking up our bikes at the bottom of town, we walked up into the grounds of a castle where we tried to find the highest point. We found it near a watchtower overlooking the densely wooded valley below. This deserved to be one of the 72. I set up the camera on a nearby rock and wound up the manual 10-second timer. I sprinted back and got into position near Maggie, who wrapped her arms around me and kissed my cheek. With the haphazard angle and the iffy afternoon light, I recognized in the moment that it was a Hail Mary. Back in New York, I knew as soon as I saw it that it would forever be a photo that meant more to me than any one of the thousands of digital photos taken and retaken on so many trips around the world.
> 
> 
>> 
>>> On 9 Apr 2023, at 15:35, Howard L Ritter Jr via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I came upon this in the Washington Post completely by chance just a few minutes after reviewing a few film images from a trip my future wife and I took while we were living in Germany in the early ‘80s.
>>> 
>>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/film-camera-travel/?utm_campaign=wp_the_optimist&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_optimist&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F39a5eeb%2F6432b7a353816d1ce09697f6%2F596a9eed9bbc0f0e09ede285%2F14%2F49%2F6432b7a353816d1ce09697f6&wp_cu=be5f733d951a09908e5b5a7798366d12%7C0913A1AB87942652E050007F01006D77
>>> 
>>> The only part I can’t relate to is not getting his film processed until two months later.
>>> 
>>> —howard
> 
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