Mexico II: Oaxaca City // Puerto Escondido
August 2023: My partner and I travelled to Oaxaca. As aspiring amateur photographers, we brought three different film cameras between the two of us: my trusty point and shoot and my new mechanical camera, and her massive SLR. With endless natural beauty and vibrant city life to shoot, we had an absolute blast experimenting with our different cameras and films.
Olympus Infinity Zoom210 - Kodak Ektar 100 Film
My trusty point and shoot and my first film camera. This was my parents’ vacation camera from the 90s, and they brought it on their honeymoon in Oaxaca. With it also being extremely easy to use and reliable, it was only natural to bring it along. The Kodak Ektar 100 produced interesting effects in this camera. I got all the saturation with the beach photos I was expecting, but they aren’t the sharpest photographs I’ve captured with this camera. Textures blended together and landscapes look as if they were drawn with a pastel. I was quite pleased with this film however—it creates a very unique look.
Petri FT EE - Kodak T-MAX 400 B&W Film
I was reluctant to bring this camera. Prior to this trip, I had only put one roll through this camera and….it did not come out well. Completely my fault—I had done barely any research into this specific camera, much less how to shoot any mechanical film camera. After a little tutorial from the guy at my local camera shop, a little googling, and downloading a light meter app, I was confident enough to give it another shot on my trip. Initial reaction: absolutely thrilled! These photographs compliment my point and shoot photographs perfectly, being almost opposite in style. The combination of the much larger lens and the black and white film resulted in incredibly crisp photographs.
Olympus IS-20 - Kodak Ultramax 400 and Ilford HP5 Plus B&W Film
This is my partner’s camera, and I’ll admit, it produced the best all-around photos of our trip. It has a massive lens, incredible zoom range, and multiple modes for shooting both portraits and landscapes. My partner thinks the ideal environment is for this camera is outdoors/bright light, and she really enjoys the portrait setting—subjects come out incredibly crisp. Her color film choice was perfect for this trip, with vibrant colors but still capable of capturing accurate skin tones (something the Ektar struggles with). She had a similar experience to me with her black and white film, where portraits are sharp and have great contrast, but landscapes are muted and less interesting. Selfishly, I was very happy she lugged larger camera around because her photos are generally sharper than mine and look better when blown up.