A brief trip down a very visual memory lane.
I believe my first interaction with photography may have been around the age of 6 or 7. I remember going to the local lab to drop/pickup film with my grandpa and how excited I would get to see the pictures he took of our family gatherings or during our holidays. He used to shoot with an Olympus Trip 35, which I happily inherited from him.
Fast forward to my teen years, I had several point and shoot cameras. I remember owning a neon green Concord 110EF and also shooting with Polaroid I-Zone too.
In the early 2000s I managed to make the leap into the Digital World of Photography thanks to a Sony Mavica FD-75 that shoot lovely 640x480px JPEGs and stored them into 3.5" Floppy Disk. No, I'm not joking. That was a thing.
It wasn't until late in 2007 that I manage to save enough money to buy myself a flagrant Canon PowerShot A560. I think it's safe to say that I learnt most of what the basics of manual photography are with that camera. We were also inseparable and I used to carry it with me as much as I could (along with a lot of heavy AA Rechargable Batteries 😂).
One year later, having done some very amateurish photography jobs to afford an upgrade once again, I managed to make the leap and got my hands on an used Canon Rebel XT that was in excellent condition. At last, I was able to fully immerse myself into the world of interchangeable lenses and all sorts of possibilities were now open. I started doing more serious freelance paid jobs in my spare time and got to meet a lot of people through on-line photography forums. Went to photo-walks and made really great friends over learning, practicing and sharing around photography.
Over the course of the last decade or so I've tried and owned many different cameras and systems (Point and shoot, Rangefinders, SLR, dLSR, Medium Format and TLRs). I've always really enjoyed Canon dSLR systems, and owned several of them like the Canon XT, Canon XTi, Canon 7D and the Canon 5D Mark III.
Around 2012 when Fujifilm released the famous X-PRO1 I was super intrigued so I got myself one as soon as I could. It was pure love at first shot 📷 💘.
And the X-PRO1 was the camera I always loved to carry with me. The industrial design reminded me so much of older film cameras, and who doesn't like to own something that cool? The image quality and color rendering was great too! On top of all that that I didn't had to carry around a big heavy dSLR with a bunch of lenses. You could just throw it into your backpack, carry it around your shoulders all day and it was always there with you, ready to capture whatever you wanted to. I think it best suited my travel/city type of photography and I also loved the form factor and the fact it had an hybrid digital/glass rangefinder system.
I also shoot a lot with my iPhone XS, which can even capture RAW images. I've been using iPhones for the past decade and they've become increasingly great cameras that you always have with you. I love using Halide to capture photos (when I'm not just using the standard camera app) and I edit most of my photos with Darkroom.
Nowadays, I shoot digitally with a Fuji X-PRO2 coupled with the Fujinon 35mm Æ’/2. And since last year I've been also done a comeback to shooting film with different cameras like my grandpa's Olympus Trip 35, a Canon QL17 G-III, a Leica M6 and a Hasselblad 500C/M.
One of the downsides I've experienced over the years since I've started with digital cameras is the sheer amount of pictures I end up producing. I've become less of a fan of spending many hours selecting and editing them. With rolls only having 36 frames (and even less in 120mm) a piece, I've forced myself to slow down and started being more intentional with things like composition and storytelling.
I don't know where the future will take me next, but I'm really enjoying trying different film rolls every other week and focusing on the quality of my photographic work instead of the quantity.
If you'd like to see some of my work you can follow me on my Instagram account.