Now that wedding season is fully underway I wanted to take a second to blog some of my favorite images from a recent trip I took to Portugal. 2015 has definitely kicked some major ass on the travel front. I’ve been away more than I’ve been home thanks to this awesome job of mine, but I’ve had little time in between for reflection. I decided before I head off to Seattle on Friday for a wedding, I should actually look at the images Richard Photo Lab processed for me a few weeks ago. When I travel, I only bring one film camera with me. This is for a few reasons: 1. My digital cameras are my work cameras. They’re too big and heavy for the type of traveler I am (I like to spend hours hiking up steep cliffs and stay in questionable accommodations). 2. I would feel compelled to take time making sick photographs of everything around me when what I really want to do is meet cool people, breathe in the air, smell, taste, feel. I always keep my Nikon OneTouch with me (a 35mm point & shoot) and my camera flavor of the week has been my Minolta Autocord for a couple of years now. It’s very small, lightweight, has very few options and of course it’s an adorable twin-lens reflex that turns into a conversation starter. Unfortunately for me, my Autocord fell out of the back of the car one day, knocking the mirror loose. I was pretty mad for about 10 minutes, because I love taking portraits of people I meet while traveling and then sending them to them. For the whole month I only took 3 portraits of awesome Portuguese people that I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to. Eventually I acquired a mini-screwdriver (all the way from Boston, thanks Rob!) and was able to fix it for the last week of the trip.
Why Portugal? Last summer, my friend Lara and I were at her lake house for the 4th of July and decided we should work from somewhere else for a month. I told this story on my Instagram account before we left, but the long and short of it is: We are self employed. We have the ability to create our own schedules. March is typically not super popular month for our job. Why not go somewhere? We talked about a lot of places, but the main reason we ended on Portugal was that it was cheap, safe, and beautiful. That was enough for us!
Our original plan was to rent a house for a month on AirBnb and work from there. I’m not sure how our plans unraveled from that to what we ended up doing. I’m going with lack of planning and both of our schedules never lining up because next thing we knew it was January and we hadn’t planned a THING. We decided to book 4 nights in a hostel in Lisbon and wing it once we got there. This was pretty exciting to me because I hadn’t stayed in a hostel since college in Fiji and I loved it then! The hostel in Lisbon was unlike any hostel I’ve ever stayed in. Had we not stayed there and met the people we met, our entire trip would have been totally different. We ended up meeting people there our first day (who also arrived around the same time) who became our travel family. There was a core group of 4 or 5 of us and we’d weave others in and say goodbye as they left. We ended up in Lisbon for 7 nights, Porto for 6, Gerês for 2, Douro Valley for 1, Madeira for 5, Praia da Luz in the Algarve for 3, back up to Porto for 3, then back to Lisbon for 4. I think. I just want to give a major shout out to our travel family: Tarcio (Brazilian), without you we would have never been able to ask for the bill correctly (and MANY MANY more things). Simon (German), thanks for being into climbing mountains as much as me. Alan (Brazilian), you have a beautiful voice. I hope to hear you sing one day. Lucian (Belgian), I’m glad we all drank so much vinho tinto together and you got us to move on to Porto with you! Please send me some 13mm fries! Chris (German), thanks for being nice to me even though I made you attempt to pronounce “squirrel” a million times. Danielle, Emilio, Massimo (Italian). You guys just get a giant PARABOLA!
All of the square images below we shot on my Minolta Autocord with Kodak Ektar 100 film. The images that are non-square were from the Nikon OneTouch, and also Kodak Ektar 100.
