Arrived in a hotel room shortly after 11pm on a monday after a 5 hour drive. I’m fortunate to drive a very comfortable car so despite being a bit tired from a long drive after a working day, I wasn’t ready for bed just yet. Also there was a heatwave at the time so an hour or two of ventilating the room seemed like plan. I decided to load my F3P with a new aquaintance, Kentmere Pan 400, and start writing this post.
England is full of amazingly nice people. After Germany was removed from the Amber List, and quarantine in a British hotel no longer needed, Nadja and me jumped into the camper van and drove to the ferry. We managed to fill out the forms for the 2-days-after-arrival-test in heavy rain at a parking place off a dutch motorway.
My father was a sort of gadget freak back in the ‘60’s when gadgets weren’t even a thing. He was always getting us gadgets for birthday gifts. For example, on my 25th birthday he gave me a personal electronic label maker. Wow. He would also buy himself gadgets. I remember he had a Rolleiflex TLR and a subminiature Minox; but he was not much of a photographer and definitely not a spy. So they both just sat around the house for me to play with. Ultimately mother threw away my dad’s cameras, along with my label maker.
I guess most of you may have heard about Silbersalz, the Kodak Vision3 motion picture film repurposed for 35mm photography. The continuing love of Hollywood kept the analog Kodak cinema business alive and a lot of directors prefer to shoot their films on the emulsion. Quentin Tarantino used it for ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, as did Christopher Nolan for ‘Dunkirk’ and Sam Mendes on his Bond outing, ‘Spectre’.
As is likely true for many of us, I left 2020 with a bit of hope for the new year and in search of an opportunity to make something of 2021. Before the year was over, I landed on a project idea intended to inspire creativity through limitation and reinforce, within myself, an effort to embrace imperfection.
