This series is so good. These two are so effortlessly great for each other.
On a separate note, I don’t miss analog photography at all really. Film was expensive and bulky to carry around when traveling. Also, because you only had so many shots you could take, you were always second guessing whether this or that shot was worth it. I often just ended up not taking many pictures at all before going digital.
On the topic of pictures, I wonder how the image was pointing at them from afar when he was holding the camera facing forward in his hands.
I think it is their reflection in the window. Early in the chapter, you can see the little part of the roof where the stairs come out (page 3):
Then, when you look at the picture, you see the window frame and then the paneling on the wall, consistent with that little part of the building:
Didn’t notice that, nice catch.
That last was the thing that irritated me the most - the constant calculations on whether or not it would be worth it to take a particular picture.
On a related note, in the early 90s I worked at the corporate headquarters of a national drug store chain, in their photo studio, taking pictures for their ad circulars. And they’d just invested an enormous pile of money on an amazing thing I’d never seen before - a digital camera.
It was a box about the size of a shoebox with a lens on the front, mounted on a big, clunky tripod and connected to a Mackintosh by a cable about as big around as my thumb, and it was awesome, because we could set up a shot, take it, then go over and look at the screen of the Mac as it (slowly - one scanline at a time) came up, right then and there. So we could experiment and tweak without wasting anything but a bit of time and get just the shot we wanted, which then was like a dream come true.
Now of course, I could take higher quality pictures more quickly and easily with my phone. Still though, I remember how amazing that was then.
