Over MLK weekend, my wife and I decided to celebrate our two year wedding anniversary by taking a trip down to Roatan, Honduras. The goal was to relax and soak up some sun. We were...moderately successful due to the weather, but more on that later.
I decided to bring my Konica Recorder with one roll of film to the trip. I figured there wouldn't be a ton of photo opportunities at a beach and this is a special type of film camera. It is what's called a "half frame" camera. This means that every frame it captures takes up half the space on the roll of film than would a normal 35mm frame. Said otherwise, you can fit double the exposures on a single roll of film at the trade off of half the resolution. With the cost of film being almost double what it used to be just a year ago and the fact that the objective of film is not for the sharpest, highest resolution image, I thought a half frame camera would be a good investment. Not to mention, this one in particular looks so unique!
This camera definitely has its issues. The most obvious issue is the insane amount of light leaks. I don't mind minor leaks but this camera had such intense light leaks on nearly every photo. Another issue is that sometimes the shutter just wouldn't fire. It would advance the film one frame without snapping a photo randomly. This only happened a few times over the entire roll, so not the biggest deal, but it's possible to get unlucky and miss your best image. You never know! Finally, the exposure was super variable. Some images were perfectly exposed and others were very underexposed. I tried to fix them as much as I could after scanning but some images just look a bit too muddy for my tastes.
Anyways, enough about the shortcomings of the camera and onto the trip.
We started the trip just checking into our stay: The Blue Roatan Resort. It is a somewhat new resort to the island. Another couple staying at the resort told us it had just opened about 16 months ago.
The resort was super nice. It used to be owned by people who taught scuba classes, so the pool was 12 feet deep. It had a hot tub and restaurant that was supposedly one of the best restaurants on the entire island. People from neighboring resorts would come here for dinner.
We walked down to check out the beach. It honestly left much to be desired. It was a bit cloudy and we were there during off-season so there were very few people around. We wandered around and onto a dock with some lounging chairs.
After hanging out at the beach, we headed back to the resort for dinner. I had the snapper sandwich and was very impressed. We headed back to our room afterwards and watched RRR (in Tamil) to end the night.
The next day, we drove over to a little tourist town nearby called West End. They had shops, restaurants, and beach excursions.
We ate baleadas at this local restaurant for lunch. They are a Honduran native food comprised of a type of tortilla filled with cheese, beans, and protein. Very similar to the pupusas in El Salvador. Next, we went to a chocolate factory. It is the first and largest chocolate factory in Roatan.
We had some samples and ate a super rich chocolate rum cake. Snapped some more interesting photos from the second floor of the factory looking out onto the town.
After exploring the West End, we headed back to the resort and spent the next couple hours in the hot tub drinking some wine and watching tv on our phones.
The next day was the most unfortunate one. We awoke to cloudy skies and cooler temperatures. Too cool to even lounge on the beach and the wind was getting worse and worse. We decided the best place to be was the hot tub so we went back to it shortly after breakfast. The other couple staying at the resort joined us for a bit at one point. They were on their delayed honeymoon. Super nice couple. After becoming prunes, we stopped by the restaurant for some afternoon coffee. While we were sitting having our coffee, it stormed super hard.
The rest of the day was spent trying to avoid the rain and getting drunk at dinner for our final evening.
The next day was our departure day, but we woke up early to make the most of it before catching our flight. We decided to check out another beach area called West Bay. It looked to be a bit more lively than the beach closest to us. And of course, the weather was perfect today.
The walk over to West Bay had some really neat boats and views along the way.
When we finally made it to the bay we looked upon what could have been. The perfect weather, the drinks, the crystal blue water, the food. It just made us wish the previous day's weather was nicer so we could have spent it at West Bay. That's the risk with these types of trips though. You take a chance on the weather and if it doesn't pan out, oh well.
Overall, the trip was a success. We wanted a relaxing beach weekend and that's what we got. We got a bit unlucky with the weather this time around but you can't win them all. The Konica Recorder made these photos almost experimental. I do like the the edges in the scans from half frame but overall, it is a bit too variable for my tastes. You give up some control when you use film but this camera requires surrendering even more.
