Mirrorless Time Travel

I’m walking down Wilcox Street in Castle Rock CO carrying a Panasonic Lumix G5 with a Zeiss 21mm lens mounted on it and then all of a sudden—Shazaam! I’m 40 years younger walking the streets of Baltimore as a student at the Maryland Institute of Art working on a class assignment.

1/1000 sec at f/11 and ISO 400

No kidding that’s exactly how this lens/camera combination made me feel. The last time I felt like this was when I bought a Contax G1 and I’m still sorry I sold that camera. Why did the Lumix/Zeiss combination take me back? Part of it, I think is that manual focusing a camera is more involving than just point, wait for the beep and click. The other part is the visual aesthetics of the package and before you accuse me of hipster tendencies keep in mind that as photographers we think visually and sheer visual appeal set the mood that when I started shooting, in black and white naturally, completed the time travel and bang-zoom here I as in 1972.

Keeping the time travel analogy going I noticed that the same subject matter started calling to me, architectural details, doorways, stairs… If it wasn’t for the pain in my knees I might have I actually felt younger too.—Joe Farace