In September 2017, the guys who run the photography podcast Graincast initiated a 365 photo project. The idea was basically to shoot film for a full 365 days without being able to see the resulting pictures. After a year, one would develop all film rolls and finally be able to look at the photos. 49 photographers took part in the challenge, each participating in a somewhat different way, creating their own rules. I decided that my rules were to take at least one portrait per week with my old Pentax K1000 on Kodak Tri-X 400 film.

When we left for our travels at the end of last year, I took a 5-week break from the project. We went backpacking and I brought my Hasselblad and my Leica, so my camera bag didn’t have space for another sturdy camera. Since I didn’t want to sacrifice (wait till September 18 to see the pictures) one of those cameras either, I decided to continue the project with a disposable camera for the duration of our travels. I had a ton of things to do before we left and didn’t manage to buy one on time, though, and decided I would just buy one in Colombia first thing after our arrival in the touristy Cartagena. I couldn’t find one, though, and was surprised how those single-use Kodaks and Fujis had completely disappeared from the typical tourist store – even the ones with a big Kodak sign still hanging. After missing the first five weeks of 2018, I finally found a heavily overpriced Fuji Superia X-tra 800 disposable camera in Mexico.

As I finally sent the film to the lab this September, I remembered all those Sunday nights, hours or just minutes before the end of a week when I noticed I hadn’t taken the week’s portrait and I felt like pretty much all the photos were last-second shots of my girlfriend Seraina. However, getting the scans back, I was surprised by how many other people I managed to get in front of the lens. I had forgotten about many of the pictures long ago and I’m really happy with some of the portraits. On the disposable Fuji, the majority of photos is heavily underexposed, I managed to take a few decent ones.

Photographers Ray, Thomas and Cody, the hosts of Graincast, have started a gallery on the website with some of the beautiful pictures created in the scope of this project.

I made a selection of almost 50 of my photos, only removing ones that really didn’t turn out.