Kreuzberg, Berlin, DE
There’s this thing I do with the photos I take while traveling, after I return home: I hate them.
[skip all these words and just see the photos]
I immediately offload the images from my digital camera to the hard drive I use with Lightroom, and I have the rolls of film I shot developed, and briefly review the negatives. Then I ignore it all. I won’t look back at the digital images in Lightroom, and I’ll leave the negatives from the film in an archival binder, for several weeks. Or longer. Months.
I was particularly bad about this after a trip to Berlin this past October. I think several factors contributed to the more-than-usual neglect of these travel photos — the holidays, always a busy time, hit shortly after I got back; I’ve been working a lot, the end of last year and the beginning of this year have been particularly busy; and I bought a negative scanner toward the end of last year (scanning is where the photo lab costs really skyrocket), so I spent some time getting ramped up on using it, with the Berlin negatives as my training set, but definitely focusing more on getting good scans over actually paying attention to the photos themselves.
Tempelhof Field Park, Neukölln, Berlin, DE
Further complicating the matter, I’ve also been pretty down on digital as an artistic display format. Regardless of the pluses and minuses of various photo sharing sites and apps, I just don’t think the screen of a mobile device, or even a laptop, is a great place to experience photography. So I’ve been experimenting with printing — I’ve had a bunch of machine prints made, testing out paper types and sizes (small 4x6 and 5x7, medium 8x10, and large 16x20…even a couple 3’x4’ engineering prints). I’m still not sure what to do with them all, but the tactile and visual experience of photo prints is a lot cooler than looking at pictures on a screen. So I haven’t been super motivated to load a buncha images onto this site, or pump them into the void that is Instagram.
Turkish Market, Kreuzberg, Berlin, DE
Anyway, after a few months of messing around off-and-on with the film and digital images I made in Berlin — and coming to some grips with the whole “hating on digital” thing — I think I’m at a point where I‘m comfortable sharing these pictures.
Berlin is a great place for making photographs. From architecture to art, nature, food and street scenes, the city’s history, culture and range of settings provide a great background for capturing spaces and moments. I found my photographic eye drawn to the things that represent the city’s approach to urban development — the architecture is widely varied and reflects Berlin’s rich history (cultural and political), and 40% of Berlin is green spaces and waterways, so I didn’t experience much in the way of endless, overbearing urbanity. Everyday life was a natural subject as well. There’s so much going on there — street markets, galleries, cafe and bar culture, protests, etc. — that I almost always had a camera in my hand, and I took almost 1400 pictures in nine days.
In my experience, Berliners are mostly friendly and pretty chill — and when I travel, I try to keep a low profile, stay polite and humble when dealing with locals, and generally just not be a shithead, which helps — but they’re also extremely, and understandably, weary of technology’s influence on modern life. As such, they’re very much proponents of digital-age privacy, and more than any place I’ve ever been, not interested in having a camera leveled at them. So I was careful about photographing people, opting for a less intrusive approach — or at least a stealthy one when the occasion allowed — while shooting in the streets. (And even so, I once accidentally photographed a street market cheesemonger who stepped into my frame as I was pressing the shutter button, and then promptly let me have it in German, which is a pretty sharp tongue to get cursed out in. I sincerely apologized, but didn’t bother trying to explain that he wasn’t intended to be a part of the shot — my German’s not good enough for rapid-fire mea culpas, and he wouldn’t have cared anyway.)
Cafe, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, DE
I had two cameras with me in Berlin: a FujiFilm x100f (digital, shooting at 35mm, or 28m with the wide angle conversion lens), and an Olympus XA (ultra compact 35mm film camera) loaded with either Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white, or Kodak ColorPlus 200. Everything decent that I came back with is IN THIS GALLERY, RIGHT HERE.