12 months on film: February 2024

So the 12 months on film project has turned out to give me so much more than just shooting film.

In January I shot my first roll of film, and as it has been the case for quite a few years now I struggled to find interesting things to photograph here in Florence.

The truth is that for a long time now I have taken photos of the same places and the same subjects. And no, it is not a simple question of visiting new areas of my city. I have to be honest: After 12 years here, I am absolutely uninspired by Florence in terms of photography.

For a long time (years actually) I have forced myself to get out and take photos anyway. I would go for long walks with my camera, I would bring the camera out, as soon as the light was special, and I even made some dedicated photo trips to specific places, I thought would spark my inspiration. But it never felt quite right.

As I began this new project I realized that I was never going to be able to shoot 12 rolls of film in Florence. It would be boring, and it would be a total waste of film and money.

So after many years of fighting against what is probably a quite natural condition after being in the same place for almost 13 years I finally allowed myself to give up and stop looking for things to photograph in Florence. Instead I got a brilliant idea.

Florence is one of the best located cities in Italy when it comes to day trips. From here you can reach so many interesting places by train in just a few hours, so I made a promise to myself (and to my daughter): That from now on we will take one or two day trips every month to visit a different city. We both love traveling by train, seeing new places is always fun, and finally this is the perfect way to find inspiration again and photograph something different than Florence.

So in February we went to Pisa. It is just an hour by train from Florence, and it’s a relatively small city, where you can walk around to everything and easily see the most important things in one day.

I knew of course that we had to see The Leaning Tower, and when I discovered that Pisa also had an old botanical garden, the program was set.

I had chosen my old Praktica LTL for February. I haven’t used it a lot, as it is not my favorite film camera, and I had never used it with a color film, so I decided to try a roll of Kodak Portra 400.

I was very positively surprised with the outcome. I had had some mixed experiences with this camera in the past when shooting black and white, but aside from a few shaken frames the colors and the focus turned out really well.

In terms of motives Pisa wasn’t the most interesting city, but the botanical garden was amazing and was indeed where I took most of my photos.

All this being said I did also shoot a bit in Florence in February.