I think I tried getting back here half a dozen times since my last post. Never made it to the publish button…
I have a day off today for a pediatrician appointment and a new apartment to check out in the area, so now I have the afternoon off but not for long. Francesca and Sammy might be getting up soon. I don’t know, maybe I’ll stop thinking hard about what to write and just let it happen. But more often… we’ll see.
Well those previous posts died quickly… Here is the round up for this year, since i really haven’t been here that much and don’t want to leave this year empty of records.
I guess I’ll start off by saying that despite my presence here being sparse, 2019 was my record year in film productivity. Never have i shot so many rolls of both black and white and color. The Leica M4p helped a lot to get the win, especially towards the end. That camera is such a joy to use.
It was a slow year, but ended with a bang. Here we go
January
Shot with my “new” at the time Bronica ETRs with Ektar. I was super lucky with this camera. First for finding it at a camera shop in Mebourne just a couple weeks prior, but also because one of the two backs had a light leak which i discovered only several months later. I loaded the color film in the working back and black and white in the (unbeknownst to me) faulty one. I realized it only after summer when i randomly used the bad back for some color. The black and white rolls i developed them later…
February
Ok so here is where my rut started i guess. I have no film records for february through march. So here are some phone shots. Traveled to Grottaglie and Tbilisi (for a change).
March
Phone shots. More travel to Israel. And the bottom right one holds a dear place in my heart. I gave her the ring.
April
Back to film! Yearly travel with Totore, this time to Istanbul. I was not expecting it to be such a lively, modern and tourist friendly town. Loved it. Oh and i was also in Gerusalem on the back end of the March Israel trip. Some phone pics too. Oh, and i got fat.
May
As soon as i got back from Istanbul i started a serious diet that would eventually lead me to losing 13 kg. This shot below is the only notable thing i have on film. Aside from that, apparently i went to Grottaglie again, Amsterdam (met up with Giggino), exchanged silly selfies with Peppe, taught my parents how to make GIFs, went to a wedding, took a few trains.
June
Went to Gaeta and Ischia, had some improvements on the diet and shot more film. Went to another wedding, apparently went to Munich for 48 hours so here’s two shots on film and the rest are mobile.
July
Busy month! Went back to Ischia, met up with Peppe for a fun day, rented a scooter. Finally started taking advantage of the diet thing (tighter shirts and pants). Went to Verona, met up with Fabio, went to a Bon Iver concert, back to Tbilisi again, and got my beloved M4p. Previous post on that… First shot with the Bronica and portra 160. Second shot with the Rollei35 and tri-x. Fun little discovery the Rollei. I picked it up several months before but really enjoyed using it. I might pick it back up again some time soon as a pocket camera.
August
I guess it was at this point that i started to pick it up with film. Some heavy rolls both black and white and color, 35mm and 120 format. Manacore was the main getaway. Oh and i went up to visit Davide in Tuscania while Fra was working the last few days in Caserta. Sorry not sorry!
First three shots with the m4p and HP5 to which this year i made the definitive switch for my black and white, after several years of going back and forth with Tri-x. Just easier to scan and i don’t mind the more subtle tones against the harsher tri-x.
Color shots both from the zenza and the leica.
September
One more wedding to close out the year, but a very dear one, accompanied by a pretty cool stripper-free bachelor party. We surfed, it was awesome. One notable film shot below, the very decent Mju-II with colorplus. Oh and Tbilisi again, because why not? And i got my bike!!!
October
Rode the bike.. a lot! Learned to do pretty much everything on it in terms of repair. Found my new favorite beer, had an awesome birthday with my closest friends, Francesca gave me the birthday present of the century (wandrd prvk!!). Learned to make pesto.
Went to Pisa (twice), went to Amsterdam. 1st shot is with hp5 and the m4p, second with colorplus.
November
The big news.
Met up with Peppe in Rome, stopped travelling for work, hung out at home, rode some more, confirmed you can wear flip flops with socks. Shot below is with Lomo800 and the m4p.
December
Finally done! Shot a lot of colorplus. Went back to Napoli for 10(!!!) days and didn’t go crazy. Met up with all my old friends on christmas eve, that was cool. We bounced between houses while there. Shots below with Colorplus and Hp5 at 400 with the new voigtlander 40mm. Felll in love with this lens.
So there it is.
My 2019 roundup. Did not think i was going to be able to do this. Here’s to 2020 with one more member in the family. It’s going to be WILD!!!! 🙂
Recognize I fully missed day 2 but it was not my fault, just long days of work and litterally no downtime.
Don’t even have any pictures of the last 48 hours, so I’ll just resort to my handy instagram folder. I got this awesome new set up with drop box, where I just have pre-edited pictures from Lightroom, and have them available all over my platforms.
Anyways…. I’m still here.
Oh boy…. here again and… what do you know? On a business trip of course. This time… Amsterdam. So not SO bad. It’s gonna be 10 days, so I think i’m going to try to pull a Melbourne on this one and try to post every day. This means take shitty pictures everyday and post them here. No Notes, but this seems like a very pretentious goal. We’ll see how I fail on day 2….
And by the way, so much change since my last post. Summer passed, enjoyed my Leica until end of August and then…. disaster. Dropped it on the ground, rangefinder got fuuuuuucked and so off to the repair store (excellent job by the way…).
If I really pull through with this, i’m gonna have a lot to talk about, hopefully. And i’m getting tired. I would love nothing more than spending a solid 30 mins just emptying my mind through writing and writing and writing. So much going on lately that I hate it to be left out with no record. But really… i’ve been awake since 3, and I really need to sleep.
So here are the pictures now.
Just a quick stop here while I’m on my way to Caserta and then Napoli for the weekend… These past weeks I’ve been taking the m4p literally everywhere especially to work. Putting it around my neck as soon as I get out of the bus to walk 10 mins to the office. Seems trivial and useless but i discovered that the point is not looking for pictures explicitly but more about being ready in case something happens. In a single day, 2 walks, 20 mins total, there’s always a chance something could happen that deserves a photo or two. I wanted to put it here in writing to remind myself. There have been a couple of cases where I was really glad I had the camera around my neck. I’ll be posting those soon..
Pictures below are from one of my night walks down in good ol Melbourne. I’ll be back there in December. yay!
New project on my mind. Actually came to me today.
So I’ve been carrying my Leica to work every day this week, just to get a few test rolls through and get to build confidence using it. I might have struck gold in thinking that I want to document my daily commute. I really like this picture.
Today’s been a regular Sunday. Developed and scanned some, but spent all day home.
So here I am back at my parent’s house. Not doing this from my computer as I usually would but rather from the tablet. Hooked it up with the BT mouse and keyboard and it’s almost like having a tiny laptop. Also the external HD is a pretty good addition.
I recently converted all my catalog of film photos from Tiff to Jpeg (even though I still scan tiffs). In this way I can easily have my photos when mobile, maybe edit them and put them here. Pretty much what I’m doing now 🙂
EDIT: So here I am nearly 24 hours after I started writing this post. I thought I’d start off writing and then to editing the set and just do this kind of back and forth. Little did I know that selecting and editing (even with LR CC) pictures that are simply saved in a folder is a major hassle…
Clearly Android devices are getting fairly close to allowing you to do all the things you would normally do from your computer (from a purely online experience) in terms of browsing, editing pictures, sharing them and so on. And it does these things well as stand-alone tasks. But when they need to be integrated and connected, is where android shows its limits.
First of all, Vanilla Android has Google photos which doesn’t even allow to reach an external drive. So any other folder-based gallery app will be its replacement. Also file browsing abilities just suck with any Android device you get. So another external app. And then open them up in LR, edit them, and then export them back to dropbox.. and then finally upload to wordpress. What the actual fuck?!
On my computer I browse the folders directly from LR, after importing from my hard drive of course, but it’s a 2-click deal. Export them once edited to the Dropbox folder. And then upload them here. It’s almost seamless.
So honestly, I’ll probably limit my uploads from mobile going forward, unless it’s limited to 2/3 pictures or (hopefully) I’ve done my editing from home and have the sets ready in my dropbox.
Anyways….. Loving the M4-P. It’s a film eater. I mean it might be that I’m still amazed by having it in my hands, but it’s so easy to get trigger happy it’s unbelievable.
Here are the pictures from my recent 2-day stint in Tuscania to visit Davide.
So…. this not as easy as i thought. 🙂
Beginner’s mistake a couple of times (cap still on the lens) costs me at least 15 shots… And I actually thought to myself “how dumb would that be if it happened right now?
And of course it did!
I can however see myself learning to focus by heart after some weeks with it. The focus “run” is super short so I’ll try to think about it more…
This weekend heading up to Tuscania to visit Davide a couple of days. We’ll see how that goes, haven’t seen him in forever. It’s going to be good to hang out again. VERY much looking forward to it.
Well… This took a while!
I can’t even put into words how excited just looking at it gets me. I’ve been dreaming about this little one for so many years. Initially I always had my mind set on the M6, first the TTL, then downgrading to the “Classic“. The M6 represented Leica’s last effort (at least for a few years to come) on the film market in ’99. Seemed like the safest bet since you would get one of the last models produced. Unfortunately in my perpetual indecision (“Do I really need it?”) prices in the meantime went up unavoidably and I just sat there and watched. However I scratched my itch in several different ways.
When I got sick of my Spotmatic F leaving me hanging during the Vietnam trip, on first day back home I head to the camera shop and got the F3 since it had the reputation of being a work horse. And it was. Coupled it with an excellent 35mm F2 Nikkor Lens and there I went continuing on my photographic journey. The Leica itch was still there but I had an excellent camera with me now. One which was hard to complain about. However deep inside I think I always knew something didn’t really feel quite right… Might have been the increased weight, the black body or the 35mm which I was approaching for the first time. My go-to lens up to that point was the 28mm F3.5 Super Takumar which I completely fell in Love with. But I did want to try something closer to a 50, so 35 seemed a good and easy step.
I’m not sure when I actually admitted to myself that something didn’t really click with the F3 (no pun intended). But a few weeks ago I actually went back to really wanting to shoot the Spotmatic again.. Even though the meter stopped working in Vietnam and it fell from a shelf this past winter, so I had no idea if it still worked alright. Oh and I got some pineapple juice on the lens while I was in Cambodia, and the focus is still sticky to this day. However with all that, I still went out a Saturday morning last month and shot a roll of Retro 100S. And boy did I have fun! So the following weekend I took it back to Napoli with me… no meter, no worries. Much more inconspicuous than that big black box I had been hanging around my neck for the past year and half.
Then came Tbilisi… see the previous post. Part of that was also see how I would feel with no meter. Honestly, that is some of the most fun I had in recent time. Metering when casually shooting in the streets is a joke. Sunny 16 or use your phone. Remove 2-3 stops for the shades and let the film forgive you for the rest! I knew it was not that hard, but when you always have meters, why wouldn’t you use one?
And that brings me back to initially preferring the M6. But then I thought back at this gorgeous M4-P I saw on the store’s website. Good condition (B+) and a limited edition that had been actually used by the previous owner. I went to check it out a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning. Felt alright, could couple the purchase with a new Voigtlander 28mm Ultron… So I told the store owner “You guys close at lunch right? I’ll give this some thought and if I’m interested I’ll come back by then.” Was that when I went back to buy it? Oh no….Don’t be ridiculous!
Of course my indecision got the best of me and I just ended up going back home. The next morning I left for Tbilisi for my business trip. I cannot count the times I refreshed their website to make sure it was still there. One week after the initial look, the following Monday, I went back and bought it.
Yesterday I shot my first roll on the way back home from the office. Between leaving the office and reaching the bus stop (5 minute walk and 5 minute wait) I shot half a roll. And then the other half where the bus dropped me all the way back home.
It’s hard to describe in words how fun and captivating it is to use this camera. The only thing I can think of is “Why the fuck did I wait so long?!?!”.
Anyways… That’s the story of how I acquired my (first?) Leica.
I hope I learned my lesson on indecision.
Here are the pictures from that walk back home.
Notes: Should I mention this was shot on the M4-P with a 28mm Voigtlander f2 Ultron? I guess I just did. Developed immediately after the fact with Ilfosol 3.
After a very slow beginning of the year, photography-wise, I started picking things back pretty steadily. Gone are the days of weeks or months passing by without touching a camera or opening Lightroom… or at least I hope. The work rut still stays, and really doesn’t help keeping things upbeat. Along with a few other personal things going on… But at least I got this going for me again. Which is making pictures.
Last week I was in Tbilisi once again after not being on business travel for maybe a month and a half. Quite a record! The night before leaving (”conveniently” on a Sunday morning at 5) I was pondering what gear to take with me, knowing I wouldn’t have that much time anyways. So there I was just standing in front of my go-to cameras…
The Bronica? Nah, too heavy and conspicuous. No landscapes anyway which are my go-tos with that camera. The F3? Still, too big… And I want to carry-on just my work bag. The X100s and be digital? Nah… I don’t want to deal with the raw files. Spotmatic? Maybe… but a dedicated bag would be needed to avoid cramming everything in my Filson messenger…my phone?! I definitely will have that… but very little pleasure and fun in shooting with it. Ok so definitely a point and shoot…. But I will be shooting evenings (turns out a single afternoon). So low light conditions, not optimal for fully automatic cameras. Even if i can regulate the aperture on, say, the Olympus XA, it would still slow the shutter down to unreasonable speeds. I need control…. There it is!! The Rollei35!!
Only downside, the broken light meter. But it was going to be good training for what is (I hope) to come. And let’s just say that I think I’m in the position of making a big investment today……More on that on my next post. Fingers crossed………….
So I picked up 3 rolls of HP5 I purchased the day before and left.
Here are some of those pictures. All taken with a constant danger of shitting myself in public since of course I got my usual bacteria infection, likely from the salads I continue to order every time I’m on business trips.
Note: All shot with Rollei 35 T on HP5, developed in Ilfosol 3 (back to basics after a lot of Rodinal which was giving me too much grain.
Frankie 