Much, much earlier in the year I tagged along with Brian Silvestro, Motor1's Deputy Editor, in the backwoods of my home state of Washington. He picked me up from Seattle in a Lexus GX Overtrail and we headed to the WA Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR) that runs along the peaks of the Cascades. It divides the high-desert rural East from the Ring of Fire volcanic, mountainous West of the state. The trip was part of our Japan Month feature series, and it's fantastic.
We had professional photographer Ian Allen with us to shoot the journey, so my role was primarily a little bit of spotting, some social media filming, and of course, curating the music. As I've written before, I love to shoot film photos as a way to relax and record the sights of my life. So I brought along my two favorite film cameras to amuse myself with. These were the results.
I brought two cameras, each with one roll of film (which was a bit foolish, given the continually stunning vistas). The first was my trusty Nikon F4, which I do most of my street photography with. It's a top-line photojournalist's camera introduced in 1988; It's got autofocus, automatic exposure metering, automatic film advance, and rewind... it's about as advanced as film cameras ever got before most photojournalists made the jump to digital.
As a camera, it's immensely satisfying to shoot with, with enough heft to shatter a car window wrapped in a gorgeously utilitarian frame. It was even designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro—the same Giugiaro that penned the Delorean DMC-12, Lotus Esprit S1, and MK1 VW Golf. I adore it, and I have a huge collection of lenses for it, so I could get a lot of different shots with a relatively light backpack.
I used this one almost like a point-and-shoot to capture shots of our truck as well as Ian's Toyota Tacoma he accompanied us with. These shots aren't all perfect, but they do a good job of capturing the memories, and with the actual work photos all handled by Ian, I was free to just mess around with whatever shots I felt like getting.
The other camera I brought was my medium-format Fujica GW690 (I). The GW690, introduced by Fuji in the early 70s primarily for the Japanese domestic camera market, is commonly known as the "Texas Leica," because it looks like a normal rangefinder camera—but twice the size. It shoots enormous 6 cm x 9 cm images and boasts a tack-sharp lens. Unlike the Nikon, however, it's entirely manual, with absolutely no assistance whatsoever to the photographer. If the Nikon F4 is a PDK 911, the Fujica GW690 is a five-speed E Type. I'd pull this out and carefully line up shots when we took longer breaks to stretch and let Ian shoot the Lexus.
(For the film stock nerds: both cameras were loaded with Kodak Ektar 100.)
Even though Brian had the writing handled and Ian had the official shots taken care of, I'm glad I brought along my old gear and some film. It gave me something fun to do and it offers a glance at my viewpoint on our back-country adventure. Washington is so beautiful that it's hard to take a bad shot of it.
I hope seeing these shots bring you some of the same joy they gave me!
Gallery: 2024 Lexus GX Overtrail+ On Film
