When on vacation, one of my favorite activities is hitting the second hand markets for good deals on used camera gear. And, if you’ve never been, Namdaemun Market in Seoul does not disappoint. Home to several dozen used camera dealers ranging from large, well-appointed stores to tiny counters buried in the basement of packed market halls, the dealers in Namdaemun have nearly anything you could want at surprisingly reasonable prices.
I initially borrowed my friend Shin Smith’s Mamiya RB67 for a trip to Oxford at the end of February. Shortly after, I went to Cornwall with a group of friends and thought it could be cool to take the Mamiya for another spin. It turned out to be an opportune time of year for colour film because, despite the rain forecast, the weather held up well while we were there.
Sadly, I messed up loading a roll of Kodak Gold into the Mamiya and bitterly regretted it at the time because I only took two rolls of film along to Cornwall. My plan was to only use the Gold roll because I was mostly looking forward to taking it easy that weekend, but I added the Tri X just in case.
Cold mornings. Sunrises. Night Sky. Mountains. Nature. Tired legs. Analog photos. Old cameras. B&W films. The smell of a freshly developed photos. Slide films… This is how I would characterise myself and my photographic work.
My name is Ľubomír Drápal, I´m from Slovakia and I focus mainly on analog photography. Why analog? My fascination with analog photography began as a child, when my father projected old slides on a projector, developed photos from holidays and short trips in the bathroom and then filled a free photo album with them.
My girlfriend and I started this journey of analog photography with an Olympus OM10 three years ago. Now we shoot almost every day, we develop and scan all of our film and I couldn’t be happier.
As a commercial photographer I was starting to become bored of the ease and predictability of digital. When you’re able to shoot 200+ photos per session the value of those pictures are more or less 1/200… That’s one of the reasons I love medium format specially, I think that 10, 12, 16 frames are more than enough to get the sense of what you’re trying to capture. More than this it’s just background noise, get to the point. Think, shoot and develop.
