Traveling light

The Rollei 35 is a pretty great all around travel camera, in my opinion, especially if you want to travel light. It is a great 'conference camera' for those times when you'll be balancing work and pleasure. It is about as compact as a 35mm film camera can be and the lens is a plenty sharp Tessar design with a pleasant enough 40 mm focal length. The small size comes at the expense of any focusing aids, though, so the challenge is that you have to know how to guess focus or zone focus. Not that hard, but definitely practice before your trip. 

The photographs we are talking about today were taken on a conference trip to Bologna, Italy. The first shot was captured in the historical center of town during the preparations for an outdoor market. It was shot on Acros 100 film which handled the intense September sun in Italy about perfectly.

I was surprised by how much I liked Bologna. It is just gritty enough, there is plenty to photograph, and the old city is very walkable. 

Bologna was full of surprises, but the best surprise of all was discovering MAST (an acronym that stands for Arts, Experience and Technology in Italian), shown in the second photo. I was shooting a 400 speed film and I had the shutter maxed out at 1/500 sec and the aperture stopped down all the way to f/22 (which explains the reflected sun star, a nice added bonus). There was a retrospective of W. Eugene Smith photographs on display. I was not expecting Eugene Smith in Italy! The quality of the prints was just stunning and it is always good to view master prints in person from time to time to calibrate your eye. Smith's prints took advantage of the full range of tones available in black and white, and the way he printed the midtones in particular was remarkable and in strong contrast to today's preferences. As for me, I had my fingers crossed that the exposure I had made at the limit of the Rollei's capabilities would turn out -- and I'm very glad it did.