Riomaggiore on film

For our honeymoon, my wife and I went on a road trip through Italy including a couple of nights in Cinque Terre. I managed to lug my Mamiya 645AFD medium format film camera with me and, on this beautiful day visiting Riomaggiore, exposed a few frames of Ektar 100.

I recently received my VALOI kit for scanning film with a digital camera—review to come later, but in short it’s already helped me scan 120 frames in just a couple of sessions—and while scanning a mix of old film found this image that I’m not sure I had ever scanned before.

Having taken the shot 6 years ago and apparently never seen it since, it stood out to me among the various scanned frames and brought back plenty of pleasant memories of such a picturesque area. I like the composition, giving the feel of the closeness of the buildings and the steep drop down into the harbour, while the Kodak Ektar colours and grain give it that slightly timeless/nostalgic look that film can.

This is also one of those frames where it’s really tempting to keep the film border for that extra film vibe, though really it feels a bit of a visual crutch and the properly cropped version still works. All the same, below is the un-cropped version for reference.