Portugal, Spain & A Broken Camera
The plan was never to shoot film in Portugal.
I bought the GFX100RF specifically for this trip. After years of travelling with the X100 series, I wanted to see what medium format looked like as a travel camera. The thing I love about Fuji cameras is how simple they are. One lens. JPEGs straight out of camera. Different aspect ratios. Less time thinking about gear and more time taking photos. For the first half of the trip, it was exactly what I hoped it would be.
I was shooting everything using the Vibrant Arizona recipe. I know it's a divisive look. That's fine. Part of the reason I bought the camera was to push myself and try something different. I wanted to commit to a look and see where it took me. Shooting JPEGs has always felt a little closer to shooting film. You make decisions before pressing the shutter instead of sitting in front of Lightroom trying to figure it out later.
Then I took a photo of a boat in Porto.
Karinna and I were walking through the Crystal Palace Gardens. I had taken a couple photos of people walking around and then a photo of a boat. Right after that, the camera threw a focus error. At first I wasn't worried. I had an X100 do something weird years ago and figured it was probably the same thing. I turned the camera off, pulled the battery, turned it back on.
Nothing.
Did it again.
Nothing.
Then I started noticing the camera was acting strange. Slow. Sluggish. Not responding properly. I pulled out my phone and started searching Reddit. Within a few minutes I found someone describing almost the exact same problem. That's when my stomach dropped. I knew there was a good chance the trip had just changed.
The rest of that day I shot with my iPhone. It worked, but honestly I hated it. I haven't even edited most of those photos. I wasn't angry. I wasn't throwing a fit. I was just disappointed. We still had amazing places left to visit and suddenly the camera I had planned the trip around wasn't working.
The next morning I tried everything again.
Nothing.
Karinna convinced me to go to the Fuji store even though I didn't really want to. Deep down I already knew there wasn't going to be a quick fix. The staff were great, but there wasn't much they could do. They gave me some numbers for repair shops and tried to help, but at that point it was already late morning and I didn't want to spend the rest of our vacation chasing camera repairs around Portugal. I remember thinking I'd probably just shoot the rest of the trip on my iPhone.
On the way back we stopped in a few camera stores. At one point I almost bought a Canon F1. It's a camera I've always wanted, but once I converted the price from Euros to Canadian dollars, I just couldn't justify it. So I walked away.
Then Karinna suggested we check one more store.
We had already been in it once. I didn't see much the first time. For whatever reason I decided to go back in and look a little harder.
That's where I found the Olympus Pen F.
I had watched a YouTube video a few weeks earlier where someone ranked it as an S-tier film camera, but beyond that I didn't know much about it. The light meter didn't work, which brought the price down, and it came with a 38mm f/1.8 lens. I stood there way too long trying to decide. The thing that grabbed me wasn't the specs. It was how it felt. The camera felt like a piece of art. Tiny. Mechanical. Different from anything I'd shot before.
So I bought it.
The shift was pretty ridiculous. One day I was shooting a brand new 102 megapixel medium format camera with crop modes, aspect ratios and JPEG recipes built into the viewfinder. The next day I was walking around Portugal with a half frame film camera, a dead light meter and an iPhone app trying to figure out exposure.
Honestly, I never stopped missing the GFX. There were multiple times during the trip where I looked at Karinna and said exactly that. "I miss my camera."
At the same time, I was having fun.
The Pen F pushed me in ways I wasn't expecting. The focal length felt tight. I normally shoot wider. I found myself shooting vertical more than I ever do. Every frame felt like a bit of a gamble because I had no idea if my metering was right. At night I was reading about Sunny 16 and trying to convince myself Kodak Gold 200 was forgiving enough to survive my mistakes.
One of my favourite moments happened around frame 36. I was already thinking about my last shot when I realized I was only halfway through the roll. For some reason I thought the camera counted half frames differently. Watching it keep climbing all the way to 72 exposures felt like a magic trick.
By the end of the trip I had shot three rolls of Kodak Gold 200 through the Pen F.
When the scans came back from London Drugs, I honestly didn't know what to expect. The first thing I looked for wasn't my best photo. I just wanted to know if I had pulled it off.
To my surprise, most of the images worked.
Even some of the photos I thought were complete disasters. There is a photo of a spider in near darkness where I used my iPhone as a light source. I was convinced it wouldn't work. Somehow it did. There are definitely misses. A few blurry frames. A few accidental shots. A few exposures I'd love another chance at. But overall I was pretty proud of myself.
Do I wish the GFX100RF hadn't failed? Yeah. Absolutely. I loved shooting with that camera and I still don't know exactly what the future holds for it as I write this.
But looking back now, the Olympus Pen is part of the trip. The camera failure is part of the trip. Walking around Porto camera stores with Karinna trying to figure out what to do next is part of the trip. If none of that happened, this would have been a completely different experience.
When I think about Portugal now, I don't think about the focus error. I think about wandering old streets with Karinna, eating incredible food, exploring places that felt like they belonged in Zelda, running into an absurd number of Montreal Canadiens fans in Portugal, and trying to photograph all of it along the way.
The GFX100RF gave me the first half of the trip. The Olympus Pen F gave me the second.
I'm glad I have both.
Fujifilm GFX100RF
Olympus Pen F + Kodak Gold 200
