I moved out of Amsterdam in the fall of 2014, but its streets lured me back regularly. 2017 was the year I rekindled my love for analog photography. I didn’t buy any gear at first, but asked my dad where he had put all his old cameras. Sure enough, there it was, his very first family snapper: an Exa 1a from 1968.
I had a few rolls of Adox CMS100II and Fuji 400-something, trained it to Mokum and wandered the cold cobblestones between the RLD and Leidseplein.
I had a rendez-vous at a Burning Man party in the west of Amsterdam, the Fuji 400 roll came in handy.
Gear matters and doesn’t matter at the same time.*
* Since, I built a dark room for prints and suffered from a serious case of GAS: SLRs, rangefinders, medium format, 35mm, half-frame cameras, point-and-shoots, pinhole, all the lenses you can think of, it was nuts. Even a telescope-mount from the 70’s. I came to my senses in 2022; 2 cameras, 35mm-only, regular slr and rangefinder, two lenses each. Black and white film for 2023: Rollei (Agfa) Retro 400s (variation on APX) and Silbersalz35 (Kodak Vision 3 without the ramjet) for color. That’ll do.
