11/22/2023
Rancho Pix Spotlight 📸 - Street photography from Istanbul, Turkey, taken by our instructor and long time member of the Rancho Pix team - read the full background story below as written by Michael Ziegler himself 👇✨
This was taken many, many years ago when was on my Rotary Fellowship year that turned into
three years living on a shoestring budget, doing odd jobs, sometimes sleeping on park
benches or in cardboard boxes after watching others doing it. Northern Scotland to eastern
Iran. Film was carried, both unused and exposed, from country to country until it got to be too
much and I mailed it to a friend back in the States. One had to be very sparing when shooting-
-every frame cost a specific amount--film, processing, proofs--and you couldn't just shoot
non-stop like you can now with digital. I may have taken only one more frame of this great
backstreet Istanbul setting, and even though I thought I got the picture, I didn't really know
until I borrowed a school darkroom somewhere in Germany and took a peek at the film with a
loupe. Then it was back to more roaming, more people to meet and photograph. It's one of my
all-time favorite images, and surely a book on my Istanbul photographs will someday happen
but only if someone takes away my camera.
