Finding in New York What I Once Lost in Los Angeles
Recently I traveled from my hometown, Los Angeles, to New York City with my wife Amanda. We were there for our baby shower, currently a wild time in life, but Ill get to that in a later post. While on our way to New York we took care of the whole packing ordeal. My goal, always, is to pack as little as possible, yet somehow I always manage to overpack. For this trip I did something I had not done in a long time and that was pack my film camera. If you ever knew me through the real world and not this digital world you would know how engulfed I was with film photography. From age 14 until my late twenties I was inseparable with my film camera. Always my Nikon F3 at hand. Always some black and white film stored in the fridge. Always a need to photograph everything and anything. My go to choice for film has and always will be Arista EDU 400. I love the affordability and its low quality. It is not the favorite amongst photographers because of this but I have been buying this film back when a roll of 36 exposures was only $1.15, oh how times have changed. Photography, such as this, has led me to experience fulfilling moments in my life. Yet even with the beauty it has brought me I stopped. I can not quite pin point exactly when I stopped. One day it was just absent from my life and the act of taking pictures with a film camera became a fleeting memory that I would revisit fondly and with a hint of sadness. What filled that absence was the seriousness of my twenties and the realities I adopted. I forgot the joy of photography and simultaneously became too consumed with doing what I had to do in order to be a successful adult in the real world. Things such as getting a job that would lead to a career, picking up debt to build up credit, working 50 weeks out of the year and then finding a destination to travel to for 2 weeks, and bills. Fast forward some years and I was sitting in my living room packing for my out trip to New York City. For this trip I did something so different yet so familiar to my spirit, I brought my camera. Sure it added more weight to my luggage but I did not care. I wanted to see the beauty of the world in that way once more. I wanted to see the world through the lens that was once all too familiar. I wanted to have fun capturing images of a stunning city as well as capturing the beauty of my wife who is pregnant with our beautiful boy. Life, at the moment the images below were taken, is beautiful. I currently am enjoying life and the unexpected surprises it is brining. Once again I see the wonder in the world and I am eager to capture every moment. In New York I found what I once lost in Los Angeles.
