This year we stayed in a little bungalow villa in Portugal. There was a quite ornate cabinet with a bunch of cameras and other bits in it.
Inside was a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex.
That's where I started, seemingly hundreds of years ago. I put it next to my GFX 100S and took a picture, to show the two ends of the arc I'm on now in photography.
Everything came flooding back, along with a whole bunch of sadness at ever having let it go.
It was my first proper camera. The first time I had a camera with settings I could change, to make pictures look different. To make them really look how I wanted them to look. It was a fantastic piece of engineering. It made me feel like a photographer, like I was capable of looking at things and making them permanent.
The GFX 100S puts me back in that place: calm, steady and ready to collect more memories.
0 comments