Road Trip Travel Series by Joshua Oliver

If you’ve been cooped up inside a little too much lately, we have the perfect bit of film photography to help! Our latest feature is a beautiful road trip series from film photographer Joshua Oliver. Joshua captured his travels throughout Colorado and California with various film cameras and stocks. Here is more from Joshua about his love of travel…

Travel is my favorite thing, and, growing up in a small town in central Georgia, it felt completely natural for big cities to be the absolute number one goal of my travel dreams. Starting in about 2017, I started checking travel destinations off my list, mostly solo and totally fueled by being alone able to do as I wished.

However, I started to notice that throughout my life and my latest travels I never traveled purely for nature, something I knew some others exclusively do when they travel, and the reason this was lacking was three fold:

The first reason being, I never grew up in a household where travel was encouraged at all and nature wasn’t of interest to anyone in my family. Secondly, I always flew to places I traveled because I didn’t (yet) have the all-American road trip bug, so, for me, leaving the big exciting city to get to a travel destination always was just a little too much to fit in. And, lastly, as hard as it is to believe now, I had no idea my own country (USA) had so much beautiful nature. For me, nature was such a foreign concept that I associated it with foreign countries!

However, once the pandemic hit, I had the perfect opportunity to road trip solo to a few beautiful places with far less people than a big city, Colorado in June and California in July. I can totally understand now why the road trip is special, being able to stop whenever and wherever you want without having to wait for someone is quite the feeling, and you can pick up and go just as easily!

I was able to take photos of nature and photos of people in nature, both of which filled me with joy.

Analog cameras and films used: Nikon FE (Find at KEH Camera or on eBay), Hasselblad 500C (Find at KEH Camera or on eBay), Bronica ETRS (Find at KEH Camera or on eBay), Olympus XA2 (Find at KEH Camera or on eBay) | Kodak Portra 400 (Find on Amazon), Kodak Ektar 100 (Find on Amazon), Kodak Pro Image 100 (Find on eBay), CineStill 50D (Find on Amazon), Lomography 800 (Find on Amazon)

Connect with Joshua: Instagram

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