Been a little while since I've posted here. Weddings will do that to a man. But anyways, for one of the first rolls of Super 8 film I ever shot, I got bold and decided to bring my newly purchased (off eBay mind you) Canon 514XL Super 8 camera as well as a roll of Kodak Vision3 50D Super 8 film. I also brought along a few packs of Fujifilm FP-100C pack film and my 35mm Canon AE-1P with some Kodak Gold 400 and some Fujifilm Velvia 100. Fully analog trip. My first time doing that. Previously, when going on trips with a mixture of film and digital, I take a decent amount of film exposures and then hundreds if not thousands of digital photos and what do I end up looking at more after the trip is over? The film!

Anyways, I digress. I decided to go because my longtime friend and traveler, Tyler “T-Booty” Worlund, was going to be in the Dominican Republic for a couple weeks, helping out with a travel-abroad/education/philanthropy organization called Rustic Pathways and asked if I wanted to join him for the week after his job finished to explore. And given the ridiculously cheap flights to the DR from NYC (given the very high Dominican population here), I couldn’t help but do it! I love exploring!

For the week we were there, we tried to travel the absolute cheapest way possible, which meant walking, the stupid cheap subway system in Santo Domingo, or getting cozy in some guaguas (their bus system of vans basically) where we’d cram 20 people in what looked like a classic VW bus and to top it off, we got super cozy in some single bed hostels, but nothing I haven’t experienced before with this kid during our Europe trip years ago! Overall, we just wanted to avoid the southeastern peninsula where all the overly expensive resorts were; not our kind of traveling.

A rough description of our route was landing in Santo Domingo, taking a guagua to Samaná, chill at the beach there for a bit, go to Ventisiete Charcos (27 Waterfalls) that are all one-after-another and was super rad (but nothing outside of a GoPro would've survived), take another guagua to Santiago, a pretty major city where we grabbed some amazing Dominican cigars, another guagua to Jarabacoa, a tiny town with some great outdoorsy stuff where we hiked and went paragliding, then back to Santo Domingo for our final days. We hit a decent amount. And had a fantastic time, and spent so little money. The DR really was a great time and a fun, chill trip.

I was nervous shooting my first ever roll of Super 8 but it came out really well! I've since learned that Super 8 is extremely forgiving and have obviously fallen in love with the format. So enjoy my first Super 8 film below with some choice Dominican music to go along with it. Definitely was happy going fully analog this trip (aside from my iPhone of course) and came back with some great photos. On future trips, I'll have to take more rolls!