A Losers Guide to Photography

Background   I've been thinking about a photo essay I want to continually work on to create a relatively large body of work of candid documentary photographs. Each beach in SoCal seems to have it's own identity. The sand is different at each beach. The people are different. The life is different. I want to capture the identity of the beach. Goal The goal is to take candid photos of the local beaches on SoCal. I want to create a geographical timeline journaling beach life in SoCal. I want to start in the northern beaches of SoCal and work my way south towards Long Beach.  At the end, I want to create a book that chapters out the story of each beach. Overall Look Shoot film and/or film simulation with Kentmere 400 BnW and Ilford HP5 400 on 35mm/APS-C/MF. No specific aspect ratio is required. These should be consistent and provide a consistent flow of informational content.  Get creative with perspective and angles.  Tell the story of the beach and what makes it unique,...

My main camera I use is the Fuji XPro-3 from Fujifilm. I love it. There are a lot of great things about the camera and there are a lot of things I wish were different or expanded upon further.  I believe the ultimate film camera will be a mash up of the Fuji XPro-3 and the Leica M-d Type 262 with a film advance lever.  Let's picture this. The body of a vintage Nikon F-1 or a sleek Leica body. Let's make this camera a rangefinder with the option to switch to an EVF (XPro-3). Let's add a nice feeling film advance lever. The software can have a conditional statement that says, "if film advance lever does not equal 1, do nothing. Else, advance to the next slide, set film advance lever to 0". Something like that. Digital double exposure has been around for a while now. I suppose I don't see a technological issue of saying the photographer doesn't want to automatically advance the film and let them manually do it with a film advance lever. A film reverse button ...