21 Aug 2026 4 min read

Point-And-Shoot from the Coast Starlight

In early July of 2026, I took Amtrak’s Coast Starlight from Oakland to Salinas, and then Salinas to Los Angeles. I’d brought a few cameras with me, and the one I chose to use on this trip was a Kodak H35 - it’s a new 35mm point-and-shoot that I picked up for fifty bucks. This camera is made entirely of plastic, even the lens, which gives it the feel and the image quality of a Holga. It uses 35mm film though, and shoots a half-frame at a time - which means that a standard 36-exposure roll gets me 72 or more images.

a color photo of Amtrak's Coast Starlight train approaching Salinas Station alongside a freight train hauling lumber — The Coast Starlight pulls into Salinas

It’s a relatively cheap way to shoot film, and also an easy one. The camera has zero settings (except for the flash) so as long as you’re in daylight you’re going to get an exposure. I think it’s perfect for taking photos on the fly, or on the train. I also found that the image characteristics of the plastic lens (uneven, vignette-y, lower detail) match my experience of fast travel. Landscapes, buildings, objects, and people flash by quickly on a moving train, and the H35 gives an etherial quality to the photos that reproduce the feel of the journey as well as the scenes from it.

a color photo of some agricultural equipment in the distance, reflected in a pond, under a blue sky dotted with clouds. blurry train tracks in the foreground — Passing objects, receding tracks, window reflections... this is what landscapes look like from the train.

As the train sped past the corporate agribusiness croplands of the Salinas Valley, wove around the dry-grass ranchland hills outside San Luis Obispo, and hugged the cliffs of the Pacific Coast, I kept my eye on my surroundings. I picked specific moments to snap the shutter - even half-frame film shoots get expensive if you’re not discerning - and these are the best of what came out. If you like any of these enough to want one on your wall, you can email me, comment below, or click here for instructions on ordering high-resolution prints.

Using a camera like this is good practice for me as a photographer too. I can’t control the shutter speed, or the aperture, or the focal distance, or the depth of field, or any other settings that a more robust camera would have. All I can control is the composition through the viewfinder - and even that’s not super precise on the H35. So I have to rely on my eye for framing a scene, color, light and shadow, interesting subjects and their placement within the static frame of the fixed lens.

a color photograph of green and red lettuce fields in the foreground and mountains in the background under a blue sky. The lettuces closest to the camera have motion blur because of photographing from a moving train — This photo is all about the lines of color from the lettuce fields, softened by the train's movement in the foreground.

a color photo of a prison complex behind security fencing. brown grass in the foreground, and two mountain peaks on either side in the background — I saw the prison approaching and waited until the barracks lined up with the mountains to snap the shutter.

a color photograph of dry brown foothills, a line of green trees in the foreground and the distance, with a single dying tree in the center, all under a cloudless blue sky — Similarly, I waited until the dead tree was dead center here.

a color photo of agricultural fields stretching into the distance, with a blurry set of industrial tanks in the foreground — I love the texture of the motion blur here but think it would have been a better photo if the fields in the background were more symmetrical...

If you’d like to buy your own H35, call or visit your local independent camera shop. Odds are they have one in stock, or can order you one. They might even have other half-frame 35mm point-and-shoots to compare. I’m not going to share an affiliate link for Amazon or anything like that; the few bucks I would make off your purchase is not worth taking money from those local shops, which are often a weath of knowledge and a hub of creative community that Amazon could never replicate.

That being said, I would be happy to make a few bucks off of subscriptions! You can get everything I post for free, but I’d love it if you paid anyway - click here for options, or click here to send a one-time tip. And buying prints helps too, either from this post or from the other images I have listed on my website.

a color photograph of a river leading to the Pacific Ocean with the sun reflecting off both. An open field is on the right side of the river, a parking lot and building on the other — One from the coast. I love the light reflecting off the river and the ocean. And the parking lot contrasts with the open field across the river.

Once I arrived in Los Angeles, I took out my fancier 35mm SLRs. I’ll write about them and share some images in a future post. These pictures were shot with a Kodak Ektar H35 half-frame 35mm camera on Kodacolor 200, developed and scanned by J&F Photo Lab in Los Angeles. I performed some minor color and exposure correction, as well as some cropping.

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