Captured by Sam

Hey guys, this is Sam, welcome back to another episode of “One photo a day keeps the doctor away.”

I often struggle with which camera to bring every time I travel. I almost always just bring my small 35mm camera, the Minolta X700, or the Nikon FM2, because it’s light, low profile, and fast. I can just hang it around my neck all day, ready to snap a shot real quick.

Last time, I went to the Beer and Camera photo walk and met Marcus. He was walking around with a full-on tripod and a 4×5 large format camera, and he was telling me about how he used to walk around with an 8×10 on the street and take portraits of strangers! All of a sudden, I felt like, why am I so afraid of traveling with my Pentax 645? It’s much smaller compared to an 8×10~

Then I decided to try it. I thought, I will take this as my practice of carrying my Pentax 67 around, which I don’t yet own.

The first trip I took with only the Pentax 645, I took only 3 photos!! We were in Vegas, we stayed around Fremont. It was not the scene I wanted to photograph somehow. It was weird. I realized that when I pick up this camera, there is a certain look I want to get. A scene like this, I would totally take a bunch of photos with my small 35mm camera. I felt like I let the camera take over and decide what I should shoot, and that didn’t feel right.

But anyway, more recently, I went to Tennessee for the first time, and I only brought my 645 again, and wanted to give it another try.

I loaded up a roll of Portra 400 while waiting for my connecting flight in Denver airport. All of a sudden, it started to pour, thunder, flash, it was beautiful. And yet, I didn’t expect this to be a beautiful trip.

The rain quickly stopped, big and fluffy clouds started to rise up from the horizon. I couldn’t capture it from where I was at. I wished I had a 300mm lens.

The town we worked at is called Manchester, it’s a small town about an hour away from Nashville. It is sooooo green. The air smells like grass, there are trees everywhere. Not like most of the Los Angeles trees, it’s those grassy, thunder green. It feels really nice.

This is the Airbnb we stayed at, which is a very unique 2-story cabin, there are so many things to look at… and you can tell, the owner loves this place.

I actually arrived a day early, so I had some free time to take some photos which is nice. I decided to start from inside of the house.

A lot of the photos I shot in the past were for testing, either certain camera or certain film. It’s been a while, I can just shoot without a purpose almost. Just relax and simply make images.

It’s just too quiet!! Besides grass, trees, houses that are very far from each other, there is… nothing…

As the sun was going down… It’s only so far I can walk to, before it gets dark, I decided to head back to the house.

And then in the next few days, I managed to get a couple of shots in here and there between work. Interestingly, I feel like I took a lot fewer photos when shooting with a medium format camera, and it takes me much longer to frame up a shot.

There is this neon sign we pass by every day that I wanted to photograph, on our last day of work, I asked my co-workers if we can make a stop on the way back, and they kindly all said yes.

When I sit down to start writing the script for this episode, I wanted to write the title as: Therapy. Then I realized, I don’t even know how to spell the word “therapy” correctly. Apart from my English just sucks, the idea of going to talk to someone professional in psychiatry just doesn’t exist in my Chinese mind.

I have emotions, I struggle with things a lot of people struggle with, one of my ways to deal with my chaos, is doing this… is going to random places, take aimless photos, photos for no one, photos only for the moment. I find this process very therapeutic. This is my therapy.

Alright, this is it for this week’s episode. I hope you enjoy it, if you feel down, feel stressed, try to go take a walk with your camera, I hope you find peace and joy in the shutter sounds. This is Sam, I will see you next time!!