In 2024, I took a trip to Arizona with my roommate at the time, Sean, to build furniture for a family member’s newly renovated and decorated home. We had a car, a place to stay, and a lump sum of cash to cover transit and food and labor. Over the next week we put in 8-10 hour days building furniture (think IKEA-style builds. This is the new norm.) with only one partial day with a free evening to run into Phoenix.
Like any other trip I have ever gone on, I planned meticulously my film loadout. I packed my traveler and workhorse Nikon FM and the 85mm f/1.8, and had to settle on a medium format camera.
At the time, I had big options; good options. I owned a Hasselblad 500cm, a rolleiflex 2.8e, several folding cameras, a few Mamiyas, great glass for everything, and premium film to pair with it.
I chose none of that.
I picked up my Agfa 44 Prezzibox.
In my paralysis, I chose to go back to basics. And nothing is more basic than a box camera.
Back to Basics
My options for this camera were portrait or landscape orientation. That’s it. I did not carry a tripod so I did not bother with bulb vs fixed shutter and kept the roughly 1/40 of a second shutter speed for all shots.
This meant I was banking on the hot and bright Arizona sun for all my shots, and no chance of taking photos indoors.
Many times I wish I had taken a different camera, but there is something humbling about carrying around a cheap, consumer-grade camera from the 1930s to open up some playfulness that something like a Rolleiflex or Hasselblad just doesn’t innately allow.
Since the photos just were whatever they were, I had my lab develop them and I scanned them at home. Scanning 6×9 film is not so bad compared to other formats. I leaned into a playfulness I had not touched before, because in many ways it felt like breaking unwritten rules.
I took my negatives to my Epson v550 scanner and did some heavy editing. The early lens in this early camera was not made for color film, but I shot color film and Arizona is a color world. I added heavy saturation, I made aggressive adjustments to the curves, I just played.
The photos are more what you might get out of some kind of mimic tilt shift edit, with the bright colors and the focal drop off on the edges.
Of course I was running around with my Nikon FM for any shots I was serious about or if wanted to take more than one frame.
Subject Matter and Soapboxes
Far too many photographers take photos of classic cars, exotic cars, cool cars, old cars, cars cars cars cars….
It gets old.
I had an experience with pack film that felt like a sign from the universe to stop shooting cars. I’ll leave my sad story link here and leave that for another page.
Now I like cars as much as the next dime-a-dozen film photographer, but I made some rules the say a $7 frame cut me off and basically screamed “STOP SHOOTING CARS” at me.
Now, I shoot framed scenes with cars, Porsches, Ferraris, and maybe something interesting or exotic like a Lotus or McClaren. My dad is a big Porsche fan, and I inherited that love, or learned it via proximity.
Coffee and Cars
Coming full circle (and off my soapbox), I wandered, on my one free day after a morning of furniture building, around Phoenix and into Scottsdale.
Now I love coffee, and my goal for the day was hit up as many shops as I could walk to. I’ve spent some time in Phoenix with some family members who used to live in the city so I have some knowledge of the coffee scene.
I wandered over to Four til Four Coffee and got myself a nice little cup of drip coffee and wandered just outside to the street where this coffee shop famously attracts beautiful cars. And quite serendipitously, they bring in a fair number of Porsches. Between two rolls, I got a couple shots of two amazing cars.
I made it back to the shop to buy some merch, exchange information with the baristas (also film photographers), and get one more cup before walking off.
Good company will change your mood. Good conversation, good people, good coffee; these are all key ingredients to wandering a city that is not your own with a film camera in hand.
Not A Photography Trip, But That Has Never Stopped Me Before
Aside from the day of wanderings, I brought my cameras to work in my bag each day. Seldom did I use them. The two most notable times I used them were on the drive over and poolside on my lunch break.
We worked hard, and the shade in the lounge chairs by the pool were otherworldly as we ached and rested before rushing back to building. The evenings were tired drives, cold showers, and bachelor-style meals before lounging for an episode of whatever TV show we were watching at the time and fighting the sleep to enjoy part of our day before sleep and work took over the rest of the next.
Many of the photos I came home with were meaningful, even if they were not inherently good. Breaking out of the norms to do some different work and to walk around a city, not my own, with a camera that most photographers would laugh at opened up some creativity in me.
It is not for everyone. The film was all expired, and the colors are dramatically exaggerated compared to what the lab would have scanned in for me. The frames were expensive. Many of the photos were hard to scan in or did not look the way I wanted them to.
But the ones that worked, worked well.
Even if the photos are not “good,” they are fun.
I’ll take that.
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