In september 2023 I walked from the mountain village Juf across the Bergalga mountain pass (2790m) into the valley of Bregaglia.

On the 8 hour journey I had with me a very old middleformat box camera loaded with Portra 400. It’s one of the cameras that was lying around the house i grew up in and I remember the moments as a child, looking at this strange old dusty box that came in a leather case. It definitely was one of the objects of my early childhood that sort of got me more interested into taking pictures, cameras and filmmaking but it should remain unused for several more years to come.

So i chose to load it up with some color film because at that time I didn’t want to shoot any more black and white. Now I know that this might seem a bit of a “waste” due to the lesser quality lens and mechanics of the camera but I just wanted to test it out and took these photos. Now the first images i took were during early morning. It was still a bit dark with clouds in the sky and fog.

The camera doesn’t feature an optical viewfinder, so you don’t really know what exactly you’re photographing. It has a small sort of magnifying glass but that got dirty over the years and was not usable. So basically I was walking around with a box, roughly pointing it towards whatever scenery looked nice, and hit the shutter release.

Focus was also not a concern because there is no way to change the focus of the lens. Juding from the results, I think that anything between three and fifty meters is more or less in focus. For the picture with the red bush I was definitely too close for a sharp result. The lens also appears to blurr and fade in colors heavily towards the edges of the image in a circular way. I really like these little quirks and effects because it gives a lot of character to the image. Motifs that otherwise might have been sterile, repetitive or boring, appear in a very subjective, punchy, almost POV manner.

The shutter release was the last element of randomness when photographing with this camera because I didn’t really have a way to find out at what shutter speed i was shooting. As there was a lack of adjusting the focus, there was no way of adjusting the shutter speed. You press a button on the side and the shutter clicks, sort of slowly. However I thought of a solution. In school we once used a mobile app to measure sounds, light, altitude and so on, with our smartphones. So used the sound measuring tool to measure the duration of the clicking noise when releasing the shutter and it seemed to be about 1/60th of a second, which seemed plausible to me. Although I must say, that I never attempted to shoot anything that was moving at high speeds.

I think that these images show how little expectations mixed with an experimental approach can lead to unique and surprising results. I’m genuinly shocked by how much I like them and this camera. It was a really unique shooting experience, also just carrying this weird metal box with me for a day, exposing it to the elements, being up there in the mountains with enough food, water for only the next couple of hours. I think that if I had brought a high-tech superfast and allround digital camera, the experience and the results would have definitely been less satisfying.

Blog entry I: Box camera in the mountains