Recently, I had the chance to visit South Beach during a trip to Miami and I thought that this famous neighbourhood might be a good backdrop for some Ocean Drive street and beach photography. As I only had a couple of hours I basically took shots in the spirit of my "walk-by series", which is a rather serendipitous experience, i.e., I go with the flow and if I see something interesting, great - I press the shutter, if not, then there will be another chance in some other place. This particular "walk-by" was a bit unusual in a sense of the equipment which I brought with me. It was the first time in more than 5 years that I shot analog as I put an M7 loaded with an FP4 and mounted to the Summicron 35 asph into my bag. Digital photography is (has become) great and superior to analog in many ways. But in the good old days (not that long ago actually), the fact that a rangefinder was slow and film was finite perhaps made for some more thought-through composition. It was probably also better to not press the shutter if one wasn't fully convinced about the image to be taken, because film was precious, and if something more interesting came around, then my roll of film might be wasted and finished, what a disaster. The new digital Leica M-D 262 is kind of a bridge between the analog way of shooting and the digital convenience of post processing. I was tempted to try it. But then I thought that why not take a truly analog shooting approach every once in a while, back to the roots. In the end I was quite pleased with the result. During 2 hours I only took 40 images, 8 of which I kept. Had I taken my digital SL with me I probably would have taken 400 images in the same time, and maybe only had 8 to keep. Well, probably I missed a few shots with the M7 which could have been interesting, but those were the circumstances of this self-assignment. Of course this is only half the truth as following the analog image capture, I had the film scanned and processed as usual in Lightroom, there is no way I am going back to the wet darkroom. Going forward I plan to shoot more analog again, maybe 10-20 rolls a year. The results can be quite satisfying and the experience is special, almost liberating. Going analog seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment in a society looking for authenticity.
