Story behind the photo

Let´s try a new series, shall we?

This is the Itamaraty Palace, the house of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brasília (DF), Brazil.

It was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, with gardens by Roberto Burle Marx. It contains works of art like paintings, sculptures, tapestries and furniture dating back the colonial years.

Now, let´s go back and explain why am I posting this. Just read a call to arms by

Andy Adams

encouraging “photo folks” to discover

Substack

through photo related

Substack Writers

.

Well, I´m don´t write a photo related newsletter, but I do love photography. Being a horrible self-taught photographer, every now and then I do get something right.
I must say that I once was a pair of hands responsible for a four-hands (I´m translating this freely from Portuguese) blog about…photography. It was on Blogger and was called “Lightscribblers”. I wrote that with my dear friend

In-Sight

Pat Tischler. She also introduced me to Substack. We are both photography enthusiasts and we tried to write about it in that now defunct blog. She´s a Nikon person, but I´m not gonna hold that against her (says the Canon man).

Well, here you can read a newsletter about photography and how I witnessed a rediscover of the analog form of it.

As I said, I´m a lousy photographer. I do know and understand the basics, but as soon as I learn a new technique, I forget all about it, simply because I don´t get the camera and practice.

This is my mom´s old camera. She got it when she was pregnant with my older brother, back in 1967. Yes, that far back. My mom recorded our childhood with that camera, all the way into the 80´s, when she switched to a normal 35mm camera (which I believe is out of use for decades now and I must rescue it).
So, the story of the picture that opens this post begins some years ago when I asked my mom if I could have her camera, since she was not using it. So I brought it home and a few months ago I decided to clean it and see if it was still working. That photo is one of the very first results. The film i used was a Kodak BW400cn (which can be processed in C41 machines). The film was expired but still yielded good results. As for the Palace, besides being one of the most beautiful buildings in Brasília, is also my place of work. Well, I work in an ugly building just behind it, but I get to see the Palace everyday.

So, this is an attempt to make a new series inside “Just a Thought”. You know, when you run out of ideas and inspiration, there´s a fixed subject you can resource to, a life boat, if you will. What do y´all think?