The Scenic Route

This is an adaptation of my weekly newsletter, Adventures Big & Small. If you want to receive emails like these, click here to subscribe.

I’m reading A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella A. Bird, a collection of letters she wrote while traveling alone through Colorado in 1873.

She was on horseback. Her journey continued well into winter with snow and deep cold. She climbed Long’s Peak (14,259′). She befriended the notorious outlaw “Mountain Jim.” I highly recommend it.

What struck me most is how everything was a surprise, yet nothing was surprising — because that’s what travel was then. Today, we feel naked without GPS telling us exactly where to turn and the precise minute we’ll arrive. Surprises have become mistakes. We used to get lost, and we often enjoyed it.

That’s exactly how film photography feels to me.

Photographing on film means giving up some control — from a film’s unique color profile to the hands of the technician who develops and scans it. It means no instant feedback, no data baked into every frame. Instead, you surrender to a slower rhythm, one based more on feeling than facts. And the surprises can be beautiful.

I’ve been photographing my family on film for about three years now, and the longer I do, the more it sharpens a simple truth: quality over quantity. That’s why I’ve been leaning into medium format film.

The most common film cameras use 35mm film, which is considered small format. The next class of cameras uses a larger film – my favorite camera creates a 4x5cm negative. That tenfold increase in size results in an image with much finer grain – each frame is larger, richer, and full of a depth I can’t quite describe.