Caution – Contains Holiday Snaps

The Break

Our summer break has traditionally become an opportunity to get some pictures made, often I shoot most of the film I shoot over the year while I’m away in the summer. It’s also where I shoot the bulk of the images for the following year’s calendar.

This year was going to be our first trip abroad with two interns, perhaps better described as one cute draught excluder, and one delightful agent of chaos. We were going to Italy, staying with family, and photography was going to be a little way down the agenda. From a camera perspective, I really didn’t know what to take with me.

I briefly considered just taking the Leica and Portra 400. This would save me the hassle of thinking about lenses and film by reducing my options to just one lens and one film.

I also considered just taking the EOS1 and an array of 35mm films, (I have quite a collection of randoms that I haven’t shot yet), as the EOS1 has rock-solid metering, (much better than me guessing at least), and I should play with some new emulsions.

I also considered sacking-off film altogether and just taking a Canon R5 and a few lenses.

The Pick

After much puzzling and vacillation, I picked the films I wanted to shoot and worked back from there. I had some Ektachrome because I liked the images I made in France two years ago. I had Portra because I always have Portra, and I had medium format Washi F and Lomochrome Metropolis, a result of enjoying both on 35mm in the last 18 months.

Once I’d decided on the films, picking the cameras was easier. The Hasselblad got to go to Wales last year, whereas the GW690III hasn’t seen any action since France two years ago. Medium format companion decided.

I wanted the Canon EOS1 with me because I like shooting it, and I love it’s TTL metering. The Leica had to come, as I haven’t done enough with it recently. I decided it could share my Portra stash with my Kodak H35.

The Photography

Shooting the Leica is like coming home. It feels like an age since I last shot it and I fell in love all over again. Decisive, exacting, quick and quiet. I do wish that the pictures I made with it gave me as much pleasure as using it to make them gives me.

Shooting the EOS1 was a pleasure, and I made some pictures I was pleased with but I’m convinced that my confidence in the meter allowed me to relax too much, this led to some sloppy technique. Ektachrome is lovely, but at its current price point it deserves greater respect than I granted it. 

Having photographed the City of London on 35mm Metropolis I thought it might be amusing to photograph a small Italian town on the medium format version, the idea had some sort of inverted symmetry to it. The opportunity to get to the town I had in mind didn’t really materialise, but I made the most of both the sleepy and less sleepy towns we visited.

I’ve always enjoyed the GW690’s 8 frame limit. It enables short focused roll-based projects and ensures that there is rarely an overhang of slow film stuck in the camera at nightfall. It does also push me into bad and wasteful decisions. While it’s rare for me to bracket or double up my exposures for fear of wasting film, I’ll bin off a frame at the end of a roll even when it’s 1/8th of the pictures  available.

The Review

Upon receiving my scans from the lab I have, in the past, threatened to sell all of my cameras and move to the woods. I resisted the temptation to go full petulant teenager on this occasion, mostly because over time I knew I would come to like these images more, or in some cases hate them less.

This year’s crop of analogue images did not make me feel like I was getting the best out of my gear, and cost nearly £400 in film and dev to produce.

I added one of my Canon R5 bodies to my camera bag at the last minute, with a 50mm and a 24-70  and I’m so glad I did.

My final purchase in the new money for analog gear wasn’t a camera, or a lens. I spent much of the trip guessing at the metering for the Leica, as I have for the last few years. Shooting the Leica again reminded why people love them and why I have one, and as good as my eye is at metering (I did okay, not great), I thought it might be nice to have some back-up.

I’ve bought a Keks KM02, it’s an OLED shoe-mount meter that should work great with both the Leica and the GW690III, which will hopefully save some of the more wonky exposures and enable me to shoot both more freely, with a wider selection of films.

In the meantime, with the upswing in costs for film and a downswing in my satisfaction, I’ve decided to take some time off shooting analog. The winter is coming, and while my cameras aren’t going anywhere it feels like it’s time to put analog on the back burner for a bit. I want to concentrate on what I want to say, and less about how I say it.

Any hiatus is likely to be short, I’m forgetful and given to whimsy…

My Suocera, Tor, passed away in late May, and this was our first trip to her house in Italy in a few years.

I took a photograph of her empty chair, as a visible record of her absence, it is one of my favourite pictures from the trip.