Gallery - Santa Monica, LA, San Francisco

Film photography while traveling appeals to me for lots of reasons: the aesthetic of the final image, the presence and attention required by the process of taking a useable photograph, the conversations that wearing a fifty-year-old camera can spark with other travelers. But one of the main joys is that of the delay between making the impression on the negative and seeing the final image. It’s like each snap of the shutter puts a postcard in the mail to myself, one that I’ll only read days or even weeks later, and maybe in a completely different place than I was when I took the picture in the first place.

Such is the case with these 35mm photos of California. While I exposed the film in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, I didn’t take it for developing and scanning until I arrived in Denver the next week. And I didn’t receive the image scans until the week after, when I was in Mexico City. (There are more branches to the film’s journey: I’d purchased the rolls in Philadelphia, and the developed negatives got mailed to my mom and stepdad’s house in Michigan.) It was a thrill to go through them, see what turned out, and what didn’t, all those weeks later.

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These photographs were all taken from the Santa Monica Pier on a weekday morning.

The top three images are of the Griffith Observatory itself. On the bottom left, the view of the Hollywood sign as seen from the Observatory is softened by smog in the air. The last two photographs are of Los Angeles's Union Station.

All but the last photograph are from Land's End, including two featuring the ruins of the Sutro Baths, along the Pacific Ocean in Northwest San Francisco. The last photo is of a corporate skyscraper along Mission Street.

All these photos were taken with a Nikon FM2 35mm film camera, on Kodak Gold 200 film. Developing and scanning by Englewood Camera, Colorado, minor color correction and cropping by yours truly.