Lisbon on Film: 35mm Photography

When the Hubby and I went on our most recent road trip in the summer, we flew into Paris, hired a car and then drove down the Atlantic coast. The trip included France, Spain and Portugal in a round trip and the point was to visit places we hadn’t been before. Neither of us had been to Portugal so we aimed for seeing Porto, Gaia and Lisbon and they didn’t disappoint. I had always wanted to go to Portugal and it amazed me how incredibly different it is from Spain, even though it’s surrounded on 3 sides. Lisbon was an amazing place and to photograph Lisbon on film was even better. I did use some HP5 plus but those shots are not included here.

The food, the gorgeous scenery, the people. I loved everything about Portugal and the fact that not a single person blinked twice at our dog Bentley was fantastic. If they did pay him any interest it was to lavish him with affection. It was simply amazing and the fact that we could bring him with us on a Tuk Tuk tour of all three cities made me love Portugal even more.

Despite having a slightly crappy hotel in Lisbon, which was quite far out of the city centre due to them being one of the only hotels that allow dogs, we actually really loved Lisbon. The air conditioning didn’t work in the hotel and it turned out they were actually turning it off instead of letting us use it, which meant we had to have the window open all night because it was HOT. Thankfully, it was a 30 minute walk into town and we had some of the best nights out at some of the amazing restaurants in one of the many Squares.

As with the other legs of this trip, I photographed all of it with my Canon EOS 1v, a professional 35mm film camera and left the digital camera at home. I had about 4 types of films, two of which are black and white Ilford and the other two Kodak Portra 400 and Fujifilm Pro 400H. All of the images below are actually shot using the Kodak Portra 400, which I think is probably one of my favourite colour films around and readily available. Sometimes it was hard to find some film in places like Porto but Lisbon had an amazing little camera store which had 5 roles of the Portra 400 left.

Black and white film was readily available in most Fuji stores and Pnac stores throughout Portugal and Spain and I also used a red filter, but those image I’ll show separately in a future blog post. If you’d like to see France and Spain on film you can click HERE FOR FRANCE and HERE FOR SPAIN.