I first started really getting in to photography with iPhones, and my phone still remains a regular go to camera (obviously, it’s always there). But after I started a new job last year, and I wasn’t comfortable leaving my main camera in the back room or unattended in my car, I wanted something else for grabbing quick shots day to day — something with a bit more interesting optics and a more tactile shooting process than the phone provides. 

I spent a long time pouring through reviews and eBay listings to see what my options were. I wanted it to be super compact, legitimately pocketable since this little camera was going to live in a pocket in my backpack. I wanted a wide to telephoto-ish zoom range (but not too long to try and keep a reasonable sensor size), manual control, a decent aperture, and something that felt nice to use. Above all it also needed to be something that didn’t intrude on my main camera usage. This was to be something to use instead of my phone, not my Sony.

Whatever I chose also needed to be cheap. This was partly due budget constraints, but also so it was on some level expendable. If this thing got damaged, stolen, or stopped working, I needed to be able to easily weather that loss. That meant no RX100s or G7Xs or anything like that. Even when bought second hand, cameras like those still go for $500-$800 CAD or more, and I was looking more in the under $200 range. The first one I fell for was the beautiful Lumix GM-1, a tiny interchangeable lens Micro 4/3 camera, but it was way too expensive. The Fujifilm X10 was also tempting with its cool little optical viewfinder. I even briefly flirted with the idea of the bizarre Nikon J cameras.

What I landed on was the Panasonic Lumix LX line of compacts. Some probably know them better by their alternate versions, re-bodied and rebranded as the Leica D-Lux cameras. Because of this the Lumix LXs get talked up as “budget Leicas”, but I think it’d be more appropriate say the Leicas are overpriced Panasonics. The old D-Luxes are also available second hand, though they’re usually more expensive, lack hand grips, and the Leica name cache just isn’t for me. So I looked at the Panasonic models. While I was initially looking at the LX3 and LX5, I instead went for the cheaper and smaller LX2 as a starter.

DMC-LX2

This thing is small, really small. Being a decade into the age of enormous phones it’s easy to forget what an actual pocket sized device is like. It’s beautiful, and its heavy metal body feels great in hand. I love that it doesn’t have the square shaped auto lens caps that most digicams do. It looks like a “proper” camera.

The lens optics are great. I know that resolution and megapixel numbers aren’t that important, but this is the camera that has re-clarified that lesson for me. In the right conditions its 10 megapixel sensor pulls some stellar results. At the wide end it also has a very close minimum focus distance, paired with a macro setting on the dedicated focus mode switch on the side of the lens. This camera is teaching me to embrace wide angles. It doesn’t have the dynamic range of a modern camera, but coming off of over-flattened over-HDR-ified phone photos, it does really well.

The LX2, like the rest of its siblings, has a switch on the top of the lens for changing aspect ratios with settings for 1:1 square, conventional 4:3 and 3:2, and the wider 16:9. Unlike most cameras though the sensor is itself a 16:9 shape, making that the native aspect ratio of the camera. If I remember right, one of its successors does something even weirder, adjusting which portions of the sensor are used for each setting to squeeze the most usable area out of each aspect ratio. I like these cameras’ approaches to getting the best results they can.

Having a little camera on hand has definitely paid off, giving me some extra photographic flexibility. I got shots of things on my lunch breaks, or stuffed it in a pocket while taking the dog out. Even just by virtue of it being something different, it’s encouraged me to think more about what I take photos of day to day.

I do have some complaints about the LX2. For one, as much as the finish on it is nice, it is so slippery. That little finger grip tacked on the front does a lot to stop you from dropping this camera. A wrist strap is a good idea. It takes several seconds to write RAW files after pressing the shutter button, and has no option to shoot in RAW only, just jpeg or RAW plus jpeg. The screen on the back, being an inexpensive screen from 2006, is terrible by modern standards, with low resolution and little to no off-angle legibility. Manual focusing with the tiny joystick control is rough. I also desperately wish it would let me use auto ISO when in Shutter Priority or Manual modes. I don’t really mind any of these issues that much though, and most got improved with the subsequent models.

Gremlins

I may have fed the mogwai, because my LX2 is starting to act weird. For the most part it does work perfectly fine. But sometimes the camera decides to make some of or everything it sees a bright magenta/purple colour, and I don’t know why or how to fix it. Changing shooting modes, going in and out of photo review, turning the camera off and on, nothing seems to directly address the issue. Eventually the camera decides to go back to normal. Is the CCD sensor degrading? Did moisture get inside of it at some point? Are the electronics starting to whisper at giving up the ghost as the camera approaches twenty years old? Hard to say. But while it is still working, it gets me thinking about what happens if it does die.

Going Forward

As for what to do next, I’m not sure. My top pick for a replacement is the LX2’s later sibling, the LX7. But it does cost about as much as the Meike f0.95 portrait lens I want for my main camera. Maybe that’s a better choice? I’ll also likely replace my aging phone at some point, probably with something like an iPhone 16e/17e, and would enjoy the simplicity of using that single camera with a newer sensor. Then there’s the ton of other weird and interesting digicams out there, and point-and-shoot film cameras I’d like to try.

So who knows what I’ll do, but I’m glad I’ve been trying this out. The little LX2 is a lot of fun to shoot with, and has helped to remind me of some important photography lessons. It’s odd, it’s slow, it’s hard to hold, and I definitely recommend it.

This past July my fiancé and I took a drive from our home in the Fraser Valley out to Grand Forks BC to see some family. He had been there a couple times on his own, but this was our first time doing the drive together, and my first time ever going to Grand Forks. I’d been up and down this route before but usually turned north towards Kelowna, and had never been past Osoyoos on this road.

When driving east out of the Fraser Valley the last stop you hit is the town of Hope. From there you have three main routes into the BC interior and beyond; Highway 1 the Canyon, Highway 5 the Coquihalla, or Highway 3 the Crowsnest. The Coq is the biggest and busiest of the three, heading straight through Merritt and on to Kamloops. The Crowsnest though takes you along the southern edge of BC through the more mountainous Manning Park. I didn’t grab shots here on the way up, but made a point of stopping on the way home. Heading up we stopped in Hope for gas and then Princeton for snacks.

After passing through the Smelqmix First Nation and the fruit farms and markets in Keremeos we started to stop more for photos. One valley in particular turn out great, with bright sun, dry summer grasses, and roaming cattle.

Passing through Osoyoos we stopped on the hills climbing out of town to the east and at the Anarchist Mountain Lookout. This spot has fantastic views over Osoyoos and the surrounding valley. It amazes me how different this place feels compared to home only four hours away.

From there we went straight on through to Grand Forks, winding through long stretches of hills with old farms dotted here and there. We arrived in town in the late afternoon, greeted with beautiful low sunlight.

We spent the night with family, had a lovely dinner and a tour around the surrounding neighbourhood. My fiancé was staying for the week, while I had to head back home for work. After a great breakfast the next morning I refuelled the car in town, and started back home.

Just outside of Osoyoos I saw what I thought were hawks overhead. I had brought my 70-200mm lens with me so I pulled over and got out to grab some shots. On zooming in I realized that the birds weren’t hawks but turkey vultures. Several were circling, flying in and out of a spot just off the road. Getting closer I saw that they were landing on and picking at a large dead elk down the slope from the road. Watching where they flew I noticed the group of vultures together in a far off tree. Crouching in the bushes I also found butterflies and discarded feathers.

Another twenty minutes down the road, outside of Greenwood, was the Tunnel of Flags. This is an old disused road tunnel built in 1913 as a protective cover for the road that passed under a now-gone railway trestle. The interior and exterior are covered in bright graffiti. Here I also met a couple that came out of a bush trail on a dune buggy, exploring the area off road.

An hour further on I pulled over to say hi to some horses by the road, and eventually stopped at the same valley as the previous day to get some panoramic vista photos.

Around 4:30 in the afternoon I had made it back to the middle of Manning Park. With plenty of daylight left I took some time to take the narrow winding road up the mountain opposite the lodge to the Cascade Lookout. This was a childhood favourite spot, having been there (and further up to the Alpine Meadows) several times with family. From here you get a great view over the mountains, the park lodge, and the Lightning Lakes winding through the valleys, with the added benefit of friendly chipmunks to keep you company.

Getting back past Hope into the Valley, I made one last pullover to grab a photo of Mount Cheam in Chilliwack, before finally making it home.

I’d love to do a more comprehensive photography project in the future focused around this highway, doing the entire stretch from Hope, past Grand Forks, to the Crowsnest Pass in the Rocky Mountains on the BC Alberta Border. Perhaps that’s plans for a future summer.

Seven years ago, to kick off the start of 2019, I took a road trip down to Portland with two friends. I hadn’t been to the city before, only heard that it was a quirky and interesting place. The trip turned out to be a great photo opportunity. We found old bookstores, neon-lit bars, eclectic restaurants, and more.

We didn’t plan anything for the trip, just packed up and left with only the destination in mind. Figuring it out as we went made the trip that much more fun, and was perfect for grabbing unexpected shots. I can’t imagine going on a trip now without plans laid out and budgeted for, but this was back before we had rent and bills to worry about.

We passed through Seattle on the way to our first stop. It always feels like an uncanny over-the-border sister city to Vancouver. Not a new observation, I know, but for someone like me that rarely travels into the US I find it striking; familiar but slightly off. Like Van’s Burrard area there's lots of tall glass-facade sky scrapers for nice black and white architecture shots.

The first actual stop was in Olympia, just past Tacoma on the path to Portland. This was a detour I insisted on in order to visit the 5th Avenue Sandwich Shop. My Dad and I had stopped here before on previous visits to Washington, and the memory of their chicken salad sandwich stuck with me.

I haven’t been back since. When looking online I see info for 5th On 4th Sandwiches, but I’m not sure if this is the same business just moved locations or a completely different place.

Wandering around Olympia we spotted a bunch of murals, a few stores, and the Washington State Capitol. The city somewhat reminds me of the older parts of Langley, BC. In Olympia, and throughout the whole trip, the weather was overcast and cool. Clouds and grey ambient light aren’t my favourite conditions for photography, but in this case it worked out fairly well for a lot of the outdoor shots. The grey lets you make use of the reds and oranges in an interesting way.

Arriving in Portland we spent a little time wandering around to decide where we wanted to get a hotel. We made our way to SW Broadway, and went to a few different places to compare. The Hotel Vintage downtown ended up being our choice. It was an older looking building that had been dramatically redone on the inside. The entryway had glass displays of found-item art, and the hotel bar was open to the lobby with a small sitting area under an open atrium up to a skylight.

The sitting area by the bar had oversized game sets of Checkers and Connect Four on a low table, with soft grey fabric furniture to match the lobby. Up a spiral staircase was the main games room; a loft overlooking the lobby. The walls were dark and covered in graffiti style artwork, leather furniture lined the back wall in front of TVs, and a billiard table sat under a chandelier made of empty bottles. We played pool and chatted over glasses of craft beer before heading out for the night.

For dinner on the first night we went to a sushi restaurant near the hotel. It was one of the places with the conveyer belts of dishes moving by your seat. Behind the passing multicoloured plates of food, we had a good view of the open kitchen area, and watched as rolls were made and fresh fish was flash-cooked with blowtorches.

After dinner we looked for a bar. We found a place a few blocks from the hotel, lit from inside and out by colourful neon signs, called Kelly’s Olympian. The inside had old garage items and retro signs decorating the entire place. There were motorcycles hanging from the ceiling, biker helmets on the walls, and two large neon pegasi on the wall behind the bar.

We slept in the next morning, and looked up suggestions for a late brunch. Local reviews pointed to restaurant called Mother’s Bistro as the place to go. We left the hotel and walked over. Again, this is where the overcast conditions worked surprisingly well for shots of Portland’s downtown streets, whether that was a gold-brown of old stonework, or the colours of a flag standing out against a white facade.

Portland reminded me a lot of Vancouver’s Gastown, but encompassing nearly the entire city; the older style of the buildings and feeling of eclectic historyw. Some things stood out as very different though. For example, Portland has trains that run at street level, as opposed to Vancouver’s overhead and underground SkyTrain system. We didn’t ride them, but still I thought it was very cool.

Arriving at Mother’s Bistro we sat down for a wait to get a table. The restaurant seemed small at first, but afterwards we realized that it had a second larger dining room hidden around a corner by the front desk. Our table was to the right of the entrance in the bar area of the bistro. It was a beatiful room. The bar wrapped around a corner, and the outside walls were red brick covered with mirrors in golden frames. Small crystal chandeliers hung around the room, and patterned curtains framed the large bay windows by our table. The food was excellent. But what made me even happier was the entire separate menu they had for the different types of coffee that were available. I ordered a french-press Ethiopian blend, and they brought the freshly made french-press right to the table.

After eating we wandered around the area to see what was around. We didn’t need to go far to find several narrow shops full of random antiques and vintage clothing, old record stores, a hat store (with a very charismatic and funny employee who wondered why we came to see the city in the middle of winter), as well as a few interesting places in the Pioneer Place mall.

My favourite though was easily Cameron’s Books on Harvey Milk and 3rd. It was an old single-room space, and was packed to the gills with old and used books. Cameron’s was the definition of that “old book” smell, and wandering around the winding paths of shelves made me wish there was more places like it back home. Sadly it seems to have closed down since I was there.

For dinner that night we asked around for recommendations for a good steak restaurant. Our hotel bartender tipped us off to the Urban Farmer, directing us to the Hotel Nines. Without realizing it, I had snagged a photo of the hotel/restaurant sign earlier in the day while walking around.

Arriving at the hotel, we took the elevator up to the eighth floor to find the restaurant. From there we were let into a sort of hallway/foyer with windows on one side, and art displays of dresses made from wire and mesh on the opposite wall.

Through more doors was the actual restaurant space, a six story atrium with the restaurant laid out like an open air bistro under the giant skylight. The food, as expected, was fantastic and aside from the hotel it was the most expensive thing we did on the whole trip.

After dinner we wandered back to the hotel for bit to relax. We had a few drinks with some games, and met a group of three local girls to play a few rounds of pool with. Finally we rounded out the night with one more stop at Kelly’s Olympian.

Starting the last day of the trip, we made a point of getting some more stops and shop visits in. We sat at F&B Cafe for a late breakfast paired with a chess game. Powell’s Books was next, then set about our last bits of window shopping and perusing Portland’s streets before heading out of town.

We made it into Seattle at around 6:00pm. After stopping for dinner we wandered around Pike Place Market (though almost everything was closed) and some of the surrounding streets before finally heading back across the border home.

I liked Portland a lot, I think it suits me quite well. Along side San Jose it’s a place I’d love to show my Fiancé one day. Even though it wasn’t home, the Cascadian in me felt in the right place.

Over this past summer, as part of my university program, I had the opportunity to take a class on large format photography. We had the choice of using either a rail or field style 4x5 large format camera. I selected the more portable field camera, a Toyo Field 45A. Our assigned work was to first focus on places, then on people/portraits, then to finally tie it all together into one complete project. I decided to focus my work on Vancouver, first taking the camera into the city, and up to the Vancouver Lookout.

The Vancouver Lookout is a circular floor in Harbour Centre building in downtown Vancouver, one level down from the Top of Vancouver revolving restaurant. The angled windows look over and down at the city skyline to the west with English Bay behind, the north shore and mountains, East Van with Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Mountain campus in the distance, and other city centres to the south and south-east. I focused the camera looking through the windows at the dense buildings of Vancouver’s downtown centre. My goal was to fill the frame with the geometric and angular shapes of the city, lit by the bright high-contrast sunlight.

After getting the cityscape shots I wanted, and taking several with my regular digital camera, I took the field camera back down to street level. Even though I didn’t yet need to move on to the next part of the course work, I wanted to try a few street shots. I attempted to get a couple of the crowds around Canada Place with minimal results, before moving to an intersection up the street. With a camera like this it’s not hard to get people’s attention, and they’re generally very interested in what it is. Before long a few people had gathered asking about it, and I got one person interested in posing for a photo.

For the people and portraits section of the class work I wanted to stay in the city. My approach was to attempt a sort of pseudo street photography. Street photography is normally a candid and stealthy practice, something not particularly suited to a large format camera that requires setting up in a tripod, taking a light reading, carefully focusing, then loading a film holder into the camera to finally take a photo.

The first outing was to the Waterfront area of Vancouver around Canada Place and the Vancouver Convention Centre. The weather was very rainy in contrast to the bright sun of the earlier day. My friend Dimitri came along as well to help out which turned out to be much needed. This photo shoot was also a lesson in how to be careful and keep track of what you’re doing with large format cameras. While I did end up with a couple of good photographs, my favourite of which has Dimitri featured, there was a few issues as well.

From a mix of wrangling an umbrella to keep the rain off the camera, not keeping a well organized bag of supplies, and still learning the rhythm of shooting with this sort of camera I ended up with one sheet of film accidentally knocked out of it’s holder, another partially uncovered while in its holder resulting in a half white photo, and one accidental double exposure with two different images overlapped on the same piece of film. Large format is a medium to be slow and careful with.

For the second attempt I went to Granville Island, a very touristy place in Vancouver with waterfront boardwalks and views of the downtown core. I mounted the camera on the tripod, opened up the bellows, attached a lens, and proceeded to carry the whole thing around half set up while looking for shots. For every person I took a photo of I spoke to them first, asking to take a photo, and quietly set up to let them continue what they were doing; a couple sitting by the water, a mother watching her kids, a shop worker in the Granville Island Market, etc. This time the weather was nicer for a slightly smoother experience.

To make these shots more interesting I brought with me a 90mm lens, as opposed to the 150mm one I had used up to this point. When using cameras with imaging surfaces different in size from full-frame, or 135 format, the given focal length of a lens provides a different angel of view as opposed to the same focal lengths used on 135. This is represented with a multiplier number called a crop factor. For example, APS-C format cameras have a smaller sensor than their full-frame siblings, and have a crop factor of 1.5 on average. So if you use a 30mm lens on an APS-C camera the field of view in the resulting image is approximately the same as a 45mm lens on full-frame/135. The higher the mm number, the narrower the field of view.

4x5 large format film, being dramatically larger than the more common 135 format (4x5 inches vs 24x36 millimetres), has an inverse crop factor of 0.28, or roughly one third. This means that the 90mm lens I had mounted on the day shooting in Granville Island produces an angel of view roughly equivalent to a 30mm full-frame lens. This is within the range of common wide-standard focal lengths used in street photography. For portraits the slight push-pull effect and wide-ish angle distortion encourage you to move closer to your subject, introducing a level of intimacy by placing the viewer closer to the personal space of the subject.

Keeping my idea for the final project in mind I tried to focus on photographing people while still showcasing the surrounding city that they were a part of, blending the portraits into the cityscapes. My artist statement for the piece ended up drawing on the concept that in a city the dense population can disappear into its geometric inanimate shapes when viewed from certain perspectives. But underneath, viewed up close, it is composed entirely of people going about their lives without knowing much about each other. To exemplify the idea of anonymity I didn’t ask any of the people in my photos for their names. We talked about what they were doing, why they were there, and what their connection was to the space around them, but not their names. This was an attempt to humanize the people that comprise a city to both me as the photographer and the viewers of the images, without knowing who the subjects are.

All of the photos were shot on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 film, and I processed all of the film by hand in the university’s photo lab. I used a Hasselblad scanner to scan the negatives at high resolution (resulting in eye-wateringly large 500 megabyte files for every image, thirty times the size of the RAW files from my regular camera). Going back to film from digital is one thing on 135 or even medium format. But once you work with the detail you can capture on these massive 4x5 negatives it’s hard to go back.

For the final display I took a lot of time to carefully clean up the photos, and decide on a layout and size for each image. I wanted the photographs to slot together in a clean geometric layout like the buildings in the images. At the recommended resolution for printing, the images from my 24 megapixel digital camera will print at about 11 inches by 16.5 inches. With the resolution they were scanned at, the 4x5 images natively printed at 20 inches by 25 inches. The central cityscape image I included was the largest, and was upscaled with resampling to print at 40 inches by 56 inches. With that print at nearly 4 feet by 5 feet, and the others arranged either side, the final piece filled the nearly 20ft long wall they were displayed on (don’t mind the haphazard mounting with pins and the angled photo, there was little time and little space).

I attempted to start making a miniature version of the piece with analogue darkroom prints as well, starting with 4x5 contact prints for the smallest photos and scaling up enlargements from there. But I ran out of time and instead digitally printed a mini version on one sheet of paper. That was partially for fun, but also so that I could have a copy of the work that I could actually put up in my apartment, because I don’t have any wall space large enough to fit the full size project.

I’d like to continue this work, both out of fascination and enjoyment of large format photography, and because I think there is more to play with in this concept. When planning to do the street portraits I thought about how difficult it might be to mount a handle to the field camera, rather than a tripod, and rely on zone focusing and a fast shutter speed for some truly from-the-hip street photography. But that’s an idea to workshop another time.