In early 2025, I had over a dozen rolls of 35mm film to develop from the previous year. Having started 2024 by trying to home-develop the film I had accumulated from years prior with mixed success, I decided to send these rolls out to a professional developer. Combined with using unexpired film, I feel pretty proud of this batch if for nothing else than well 70% bear an image of something!

In this post I'd like to share some of my favorite photos from the year-- mostly from trips I had the chance to take with my family. I was shooting mostly (color) Kodak Porta 400 and (b&w) Ilford HP5 with a battle-hardened garage sale Nikon L35. It was a pretty good setup, I'd say-- though counting the money spent on film, processing, time scanning, sorting and annotating, maybe not my wisest hobby. Nonetheless, there's something about film photography (or so I tell myself) that makes it worth it.

My first ever international trip for "business" brought me to the UK in October of 2024. I was fortunate enough to be able to bring my folks along and we tacked on a second week to the trip to explore the area as best we could with a toddler and not a lot of research into the best places to visit. Things would have been a lot different for our checked bags had we known that the UK-equivalent of flea markets were "car boots"!

The roll that I shot the first half of this trip on was already loaded into the camera and got the TSA x-ray machine treatment. By some miracle this is actually the only roll that got fucked. Even with the murky hue, the photos still came out looking neat.

The B&W Ilford film, perhaps by virtue of not having cooked in a camera for months, provided some much better photos even while I was drunk enough to be surprising colleagues with flash photography. I was mildly disappointed my photos of old London architecture didn't turn out too well-- but not nearly as disappointed by how little of the old London architecture is actually still preserved. Glass boxes as far as the eye can see. Note to self to visit York next time.

I took a day trip with my son down to Brighton Beach, a location that has always floated around in my mind as being some sort of Victorian-era dreamscape. And it really was neat! Of course it still smells of the modern tourist but the boardwalk was worth the meandering trek through the town. Looking back, I really should have let the little guy spend more time in the arcades. We had plenty of time before the last train home.

Part of my problem with this hobby is that I try to capture my love of long walks through cities at night but I am too lazy to sit still or lug a tripod with me. A theme that will be repeated over and over again without me learning. But the camera tries its damnedest to take advantage of the bright Waterloo street lighting.

Before we had our little one, my wife and I would try to take a trip somewhere in Europe or Asia once a year. Obviously, covid and then having a child complicated this and we had about a five-year hiatus on international travel. One of my wife's stated prerequisites for having a second child was to travel once again to Saigon. Since we were already flying 14 hours across the Pacific with a toddler, we figured we should make the most of it so we tacked on Hanoi, Kyoto, and Tokyo. This was far too long to be away from home but hey we'll be better prepared the next time we are able to travel again in five years!

This was our third time traveling to Ho Chi Minh City-- having gone once when we first met and then a second time on our bootleg honeymoon. I've always loved the street scenes, organic urban sprawl with a smothering of foliage anywhere it can find root. There's no lack of film photography hobbyists in this uniquely photogenic city. I think back lovingly to Xanh Film Store tucked back in an alleyway and offering the same model of L35 for sale that I was sporting. I can in no way reproduce the gritty lived-in beauty of the city as an outsider let alone as a weak hobbyist, but I feel like I have captured a hint of it.

Each time we visit, we find ways to escape into the more interesting parts of Old Saigon. My Vietnamese is shit but people are always willing to help me as best they can. I've been to no place in the world with more cozy coffee shops. Somehow black-and-white photos seem the best here. Maybe the dreamy aspect of the dark foliage on the light-colored buildings or the reduction of the noise of untamed electrical wires and detritus help highlight the most of the town. Maybe it just makes it a little bit hazier as to what year it really was when the photo was taken.

I'd never been to Hanoi before this trip. While I think some of my judgement of the city is clouded by my mother-in-law's insistence on staying in the tourist-trap "Old" Quarter, I'm grateful that at least the weather was cool. Even winter in southern Vietnam is way too hot for me. Hanoi has some cool streets too...

...but what I remembered to focus on during this part of the trip was the cool motor scooters. Can't beat the Super Cub in all its many forms.

At one point in the trip, my wife son and I ran away from the depressing museum tour we were on and decided to go on a hunt through the rain to find a film shop (ed note, I was looking for Instax film this time, okay). After many dead-end alleys and choppy conversations with confused locals we finally out the place. They didn't have any Instax film but the shop was rad and my son got this great picture of the shop owner. Cheers, dude.

The best part of our trip to Hanoi was to the touristy (but rightfully so) Ninh Binh and Tràng An. Despite initial skepticism, both my motion sick wife and cautious son were quite happy with being rowed around a gorgeous aquatic cave and mountain valley complex. I did my damnedest to minimize photos of other tourists. It was pretty busy! But still just gorgeous and not too hard to get away and go look at funny frogs or cool birds. I spent way too much film on the little cat hanging out at the visitor center cafe.

I also documented this in mixed media via my travel journal-- including chicken-scratch writing and shitty sketches of the countryside while in the car.

I had heard much of how crowded Kyoto's cultural sites could get, but man, even in December? I'm obviously not a big fan of crowds anywhere, but I truly had the best time on our trip to Japan when I was alone. Compounded by my son's misaligned sleep schedule where he was waking up at noon most days, we rarely had a chance to get to places before the crowds let alone find a sushi restaurant that hadn't sold out of sushi by the time we were ready for dinner. So much of my trip was my hyper-early-morning stroll-- seeing how far from the hotel I could go before the old boy woke up. Our hotel was right by the Kyoto National Garden...

... walking distance from Nijo Castle...

... and a short subway ride from the Kyoto Botanical Garden.

So I was able to get to each well before tour buses started rolling in, generally even before the gates opened. With ample fall foliage abounding, I was happy to have a chance to take some photos that didn't include dodging selfie sticks. And I'm glad I swapped over to color film in time! I'm surprised I didn't take more street photography as Japanese streets and suburbia have always been fascinating to me. A combination of nervousness when aiming a camera in residential neighborhoods and shaky hands kept my shots minimal. Instead I got the most mileage out of the simply unmatched natural beauty of the country. Probably best I spent plenty of time looking with my eyes rather than just through a lens. Also the old Toyota Crown cabs kick ass.

Only a handful of my shots from Tokyo turned out. None are really worth showing here. I think I lost a roll somewhere. I'll update this section if I ever come across it

Any time I take a photo with a film camera, I try to take the same one with a phone camera so it's not so tragic when a roll doesn't turn out. As I've discussed in this post on journaling, I have a strong compulsion to record, collect, and preserve. To what end? It's not clear, but as my photography shifts away from landscapes and artsy shots and more into pictures of my family I hope that I find it valuable in my older years that 30-year old me spent them time taking pictures, even in a rather antiquated manner, because it was fun. Phones can capture a moment but film photography seems better at capturing the memory. And as my toddler has shown an interest in cameras-- quite to the detriment of 10+ photos I developed of the ceiling of a taxi cab among hilarious others-- I hope my kids and maybe curious future humans find this labor of film photography was worthwhile.

Have some foot pictures.