After having visited Penang about three years ago on a Southeast Asia trip, I went back to the Malay island this November for a work trip. I was there for a week and we had a pretty tight schedule that didn’t allow for much personal shooting. When we went to George Town towards the end of the week, though, we stopped at this pretty fishermen’s beach and I shot a few frames on the Leica.

We initially planned a trip to Japan on our way back from Hawaii in early spring, making it a round-the-world trip. However, we had to change plans and fly back the other way around, postponing our trip to Japan by a few weeks. So by the beginning of June, we finally left for Japan after spending a bit over a month at home. On the road again! (Or in the air, rather.) We had been to Tokyo a year and a half earlier and absolutely loved it, but we hadn’t seen anything else of Japan. This time, besides Tokyo, we were to visit the two small towns Hakone and Yamanakako in the Fuji Five Lakes region, close to the beautiful symmetrical volcano, as well as Kyoto.

When the tickets went live for this year’s Traveling Light, I didn’t hesitate and booked my spot as soon as possible. Traveling Light is a gathering for photographers passionate about film photography. I wrote a few words about it on this blog last year. This year’s event was even better! It was a perfect mix of inspiring keynote presentations held by speakers from all kinds of different styles and genres, workshops with some of the industry’s best and most experienced photographers, delicious food, a few parties, and a whole lot of side activities.

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.

Before I’m diving into the Oahu part of our trip, the first picture here is that one photo I took on Maui. Oahu was our last destination on our 3.5-months-trip (not counting a 20-something-hour layover in LA). After having been to quite a number of beaches within the last few days on the Big Island, we didn’t need much beach time on Oahu. Instead, we did the short hike/walk up to the Diamond Head crater, where I took the same photo I’d taken two years ago. We ate a lot of delicious things (poké!) and (re)discovered some great coffee spots in Honolulu and enjoyed being in a big city again after a few weeks without one. And we rented a […]

We flew from San Francisco to Maui after a week. We weren’t able to rent a car because my license had been stolen along with my daypack in Mexico. This, along with the not-so-great public transport on the island and the location of the exorbitantly overpriced apartment we rented, led to us not seeing a whole lot of Maui at all. We went to the beach once or twice and spent what felt like most of our time Skype-calling several car rental and car sharing companies and getting frustrated because we couldn’t really go anywhere. At least, the weather wasn’t great either so we didn’t miss that much. I took one single photo on Maui, which is why I’m skipping […]

It was my first time in San Francisco, second time for Seraina – she’d once visited the city with her uncle when she was a child. The city was everything I expected and more. Buildings and streets were beautiful, it was rainy and rather cool at first (though we got quite some sun a few days later). We ate like kings and queens for a full week, coffee was top-notch, people looked very normal. Our Airbnb was a cozy room in huge, old, beautiful apartment heavy with Asian antiques.

Leaving Colombia after a month, we flew from Bogotá to Cancún. We stayed in the city only long enough to go on an Isla Mujeres day trip, then moved on to spend the next two weeks eating our way through Quintana Roo and the Yucatán Peninsula. En route, we got to relax on some beautiful beaches, went diving and snorkelling with eagle rays and turtles and, of course, visited the famous ruins of Chichén Itzá and Ek’ Balam. It was a really wonderful time, even though my daypack was stolen after the first week in Playa del Carmen – a place we initially wanted to avoid.

In spring 2017, Seraina decided that she wanted to travel. She found a job to earn the money she needed, I managed to schedule work the way I had to, and we slowly began making plans for a 3-to-5-months-long trip to start by the end of the year. A few months later, we moved out of the apartment I had lived in for the last four years and embarked on a 3.5-months-long journey that led us to Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. Our first stop was New York City. The city greeted us with freezing temperatures – we were equipped with the thinnest and lightest down jackets we could find.

I had the opportunity to go to Vietnam again last November for a client I had previously worked with. We spent two weeks shooting video footage in various places throughout the country. The trip took us to Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Hoi An as well as very briefly to Da Nang and Bangkok. Despite long hours every day, I managed to also shoot some film. Except for Da Nang, I had visited all these places in 2015 on a 7-week Southeast Asia trip with Seraina. They’re all very fascinating places, though, and I was happy to go back and see them from a different side: the large office spaces in skyscrapers, the hidden rooftop terraces, the great restaurants where the locals we worked with took us night after night.