The delayed rays of a star

I'm lucky enough to have two things to look forward to at the moment. Firstly, I'm going on a two day workshop at The Papered Parlour this weekend, where I will learn to properly use my (Dad's-on-long-term-loan) digital SLR camera. Secondly, on Thursday I am flying to Canada - my boyfriend's homeland - for almost three weeks.

My boyfriend Joel and I both love to take photos. He likes instant cameras and can mostly be found weilding a massive black plastic Instax camera. I love digital photography, but also like to use a film camera called a Diana, which Joel gave me as a birthday present. Our upcoming trip has got me reminiscing about our last major holiday, which was to Morocco last year. The title of this post is somewhat cheesy, but it comes from one of Walter Benjamin's struggles to describe photography. Our pictures of the real Morocco we experienced in the past reach out to touch me today.

When I first got my photos back I thought something had gone wrong behind the scenes at the developing lab. They were all a yellowy pink colour. Then I realised that Morocco itself is pink - the air, the buildings, the crockery - and the colour had simply leaked into my negatives. I love these atmospheric (and slightly blurry) pictures.

You can see that I developed a penchant for taking photos of palm trees. Here is Joel amongst some palm trees.

Here I am brandishing my (un)trusty Diana - she tends to do what she wants when it comes to taking pictures, so I can't claim any responsibility for the beauty of the images above.

Here is Joel deftly maneuvering the enormous Instax camera. I took this picture of him on his phone. You can never have enough cameras!

These are Joel's Instax photos. You can see that he is partial to photographing buildings. Marrakesh is not short of beautiful pink art deco structures.

Even the park benches are pink in Morocco. 

In stark contrast to North Africa, the west coast of Canada in October will be fairly cold and very rainy, but we are taking our cameras and I look forward to putting newly learned photography techniques into practice.