Back in town

Back in town after a long month of traveling through northern Italy, the French Alps and the suave, undulating countryside of the Lot-et-Garonne in France's South-West. Altogether we logged around 4500 km. I had left with 8 cameras in my bag - all 24x36/56 format - and I feared this might be much more confusing than helpful. It wasn't. In fact I enjoyed having the mix of cameras and focal lengths at my disposal. I worked a lot with the Contax RTS III and the Planar 85/1.4. An addictive combo. Then the Hexar RF with the Biogon 25/2.8 and the Noct 50/1.0. The Xpan and the M2 with the Heliar 15/4 saw somewhat less action. I hardly used the little Leica CM. And in between the 5D came out for some candid shots. Altogether I shot some 1000 exposures on film and 200 or so digitally. This should provide me with enough material to compose an interesing photographic travelogue. Let's see what comes out of the lab tomorrow. 

Apart from shooting we visited the summer festival in Lectoure ("Eté Photographique") which I found way too conceptual and overrated. The only real discovery there was Serge Clément, a Quebecois photographer with a keen, Callahan-inspired eye for urban textures. He has a nice book out at Marval. I also wrote a short Amazon review of Arnaud Frich's book on panoramic photography. Finally, we passed a few of the ubiquitous antique markets on one of which I saw a Mamiya C33 TLR. I'd never seen this camera before and with its long bellows and extensive range of interchangeable lenses (55-250mm) it seems like a very interesting tool. They sell quite cheaply these days ...

Now I look forward to the next couple of weeks to put some order in my archive, streamline the final design of the Pakistan portfolio, prepare a new submission for Millennium Images.