After my mother passed away after her battle with breast cancer, I decided to take an extended weekend trip in our Jeep Wrangler to tour the New Mexico Back Country Discovery Route. I didn’t have enough time to do the entire route, but picked up the route near Roswell and headed north. I brought both my Nikon Zfc – my new favorite camera – and my Toyo View VX-125 film camera. Two opposite ends of the camera spectrum. One is small, light, powerful, digital, with excellent low-light and autofocus capabilities. The other is large, unwieldy, shoots film, and is slow and completely manual focus, but very satisfying to shoot. I took hundreds of pictures with my Nikon Zfc, but only seven frames with my Toyo.
I had limited time for my trip, so spending 20 minutes taking a picture with my view camera meant I really had to want to take the picture. It is easy to just pull over with my Nikon and grab a quick picture and be on my way. The Toyo requires much more thought and preparation to shoot, and then a lot more work later to process the image. It is easy to just grab a shot with my Nikon and just move on. I had to force myself to slow down and pick some subjects to photograph along the way.
I shot this image on Ilford Delta Pro 100 film at ISO-100 box speed and developed the film at home in Kodak D76 developer. I used my newly-acquired Film Holders iPhone app to record my settings. It even recorded the location of the photo, which I can then view in Adobe Lightroom.
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