This Year’s Vacation: Boothbay Harbor, Maine

As a tribute to my father, who passed away in 1999, we vacationed this year in his (and my) favorite region of Maine; Boothbay Harbor.

Before leaving, I offloaded all the images from all three digital camera’s SD cards and reformatted them, so it would be a simple task to offload only the vacation images upon return.

When it came time to transfer them to my Mac, I put them all together in one folder with no regard as to which camera they came from, and simply sorted them by date. This will be the first time I brought together all three digital cameras, and one film camera, using them interchangeably.

On several occasions, I had both my N80 35mm film body and my D90 APS-C digital body dangling from my neck. Aside from the fact that each time I exposed a frame of film on the N80 I would glance down at the absent LCD, the experience was pretty much seamless. The times that I took along only the N80, I felt unique and empowered. It was a good feeling. The shooting experience with the N80 is smooth and refined. Near silent. Not at all like one would expect shooting with film to be. At one point, I had the Lensbaby mounted to the N80 in manual mode, and used the N80 to determine the correct exposure.

So the playing field is sort of leveled. Yes, it’s fun to shoot digital, but shooting with film is special. So, it could go either way.

I returned from the top of Pemaquid Light, to a crowd of tourists waiting to ascend. I openly said, “I had to come down eventually, after all, I just ran out of film”. It was funny to see people’s reaction, chuckling as they acknowledged my humor. Only I wasn’t joking. “No really, I actually did run out of film” I said, and to the amazement of the crowd, opened my camera back to remove the spent cartridge of film. It was as if I was an alien from another world. It’s actually a good ice breaker, because people start to ask you all sorts of questions, and you have the opportunity to set them straight.