Photography: Cityscape of Barcelona on 35mm Film
I've been needing to post a lot more photography, and for once I actually have a lot of photographs to share. In Barcelona alone I managed to take a few hundred in total. Not all are amazing or worthy of sharing, unless I find a story to share alongside them from those days, but I'm very happy with the majority. Particularly the 35mm film ones!
Barcelona isn't a particularly tall city. There aren't many skyscrapers, which is something I actually really enjoyed about it. It felt more natural, more free and cultural as a result of less urban, soulless towers being home to only corporations and offices. It felt like the city was more of a community, more connected.
This particular image was taken as the sun began to set, from a mountainside that overlooked the city of Barcelona. I shot it on Portra 400 film, with my Canon AE-1, with a Canon FD 50mm 1.8 lens. There's, from what I figure, a small light leak towards the bottom of the image, but I like that slight imperfection. It's the imperfections that sometimes appear that make 35mm film that extra bit more special.
Tripoli (Libya) doesn't have skyscrapers and I get exactly the same feeling about where I live~
One thing I really loved was how people live above the storefronts. The ground floors will be all different types of shops, some large, others small and independent. The additional floors would be people's homes. You'd often see people entering and leaving.
In the UK, you don't see that at all. People don't live so close to such areas. If you do, you're rich. If you're capable of being in the centre of a city, surrounded by cafes and restaurants and various stores just as you leave your apartment, you're one of the very lucky few. For example, in London, that would be £2k~ a month in the outer zones, but to experience it like Barcelona could easily be £2k~ a WEEK.
Ah, we have those too.
Small shops that are most likely owned by the family of the house, and above them a floor or two of people's homes. Or is that not the same thing?
The thing about Libya is that you have homes and shops not far from each other and I like it very much!
Basically, the ground floor is a storefront. Some businesses there will be huge franchises, others will be smaller and more independent, not chains.
The rest of the building, which will be several floors high, will be apartments where people live. So you could quite literally be walking towards, say, McDonald's, and right next to it will be the door to the apartment building's elevator/stairs to the apartments that sit above.