My sister-in-law just moved from Chicago to North Carolina and it’s got me missing that state like crazy. This is a trip we took there in 2016. Growing up, my family would make the long trek down once in the summer and once at Christmas each year to visit my grandparents…and I loved seeing those seasons for sure! But I had never experienced driving through the mountains in the fall, and let me just say – it’s pretty dang magical. It really did feel like a scene out of a movie as we drove the windy Blue Ridge Parkway through the mountains, colorful leaves fluttering down in slow motion, with the windows rolled all the way down and our noses (dogs and us included) breathing in deeply the fresh air and smell of autumn leaves.
We wanted to make sure that we did 2 things on this trip: see the mountains in full fall color & take our dogs hiking in them. I also wanted to shoot with a vintage camera on this trip, so I took my father-in-law’s old Canon AT-1. There’s something so great about super simple buttons for exposure, and a limited number of frames by using film; in many ways the limiting of options is actually freeing…quite the paradox, right? Okay, I know that’s getting pretty deep now…so let me shatter this picture-perfect description of our trip to tell you that the reality was that the camera ended up working half of the time and quit working right after we made it to our destination – the family farm. The film wouldn’t catch right on the gears to advance, the shutter wouldn’t release, and the only way to try to fix it is fumbling around in pitch black darkness and hope your fingers can feel what’s going wrong. No such luck. Oh yeah, aaand somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway is a hubcap of ours…
But needless to say, a wonderful trip all in all. And looking back at the images, I have even more appreciation for the nostalgia this camera lent to the images with it’s radial discoloration and imperfections. No Instagram filters here! I included one the of the last shots on here of the farm that’s totally blurry, but I love it so much because it reminds me of images I would have seen in my grandparents’ photo albums from the 60s/70s <3
