In the spring of 1984, I set off on a long bicycle tour. I brought a cheap Nikon camera, a ton of inexperience, a cheap knockoff set of lenses, and 24 rolls of Kodachrome.
I didn’t have a phone. I didn’t have Instagram. I had thirty-six frames per roll, a budget of five shots per day. I had to compose carefully.
That camera became more than just a tool. It became a lens through which I learned to see. And more than that, it taught me how to look.
One Shot at a Time
When you have a limited number of exposures, you learn not to waste them. You don’t fire off ten shots of the same mountain from slightly different angles. You wait. You frame. You breathe. You decide.
The Discipline of Attention
Looking through the viewfinder forced me to slow down. I noticed the way laundry flapped on a line in a Greek village. The play of light on cobblestones in an Italian piazza. A boy’s sideways glance at a passing cyclist. These were things I might have missed had I been snapping away mindlessly.
The camera became a kind of filter—not between me and the world, but between me and distraction. It helped me focus on what mattered.
Saying No to “More”
Today, we can take hundreds—thousands—of photos with barely a second thought. And while that kind of access has its merits, I sometimes think we’ve traded abundance for attention. There’s something sacred about choosing just one image to represent a moment, knowing it might be the only one you get.
Film taught me restraint. And in that restraint, I found richness.
The Memory Behind the Image
Ironically, many of my clearest memories from that trip aren’t the ones I photographed. They’re the ones where I considered taking a picture—but chose instead to simply stand there, fully present.