Posts by Zach Margolis

After a lot of trains in the previous part of my trip, I hopped on a quick three hour or so flight to Istanbul.

The main anchor for this entire Europe trip was that my my friends Maryam and Candan’s wedding in Istanbul. A lot of friends from back home also traveled out for this wedding so it was great to have familiar faces to explore with.

I’d never been to Istanbul before, and I loved how alive the city felt! There were always people out and about. We could take the ferries across the Bosphorous after midnight. During the day there were so many ferries moving constantly. Now I understand why clearing a path for swimmers across the Bosphorous is only done once a year.

The food was stellar, we had some great Turkish delights, and my absolute favorite dessert was Künefe (which apparently is more of an Arabic dish), in addition to some stellar baklava.

In terms of film stocks, this part of the trip is where I mixed things up the most. I had about half a roll of Kodak 200 (my go-to for most of the trip) when I landed and shot that in the first few days. Then I switched to a roll of Ektar 100, and the brick and stone really benefitted from it! Next I shot a roll of Cinestill 50d which is a little flatter, but had a few shots with some really fun red halation.

• Exploring
• Galata Tower
• Kitties

Exploring

Galata Tower

For the first part of the trip, we stayed in Karaköy. Galata tower was at the top of the hill in this neighborhood and it felt like no matter where we went, all roads led to or from this tower. Inevitably, it ended up in a lot of my photos

Kitties

One of the things I heard before visiting was that there would be a ton of cats on the street. Reports were completely accurate, there were cats everywhere with varying levels of friendliness. Lauren made a point to try to pet every single one that we passed by.