Heartbreak Hotel

Don’t know how many times I stayed at the Achat Hotel near the airport in Frankfurt, Germany before I finally got a picture of their neon sign. This a was actually some time around 1995… stumbling back from a ‘good night out’, I’d said goodbye to everyone I was trying to impress with my cool, switched to super-geek mode, and went to my room and fished out the SLR and tripod (being a natural-born geek I never travel without that stuff natch)…

Not normal at all around that area to set up a tripod in front of a hotel at 2AM… but geeks don’t care about stuff like that. So I reeled off a couple of shots. And as this was taken on film, I wouldn’t know how crap these shots had turned out till I got the reel developed after I got back to Brussels, complete with 3,250 dust specks…. So now, many years down the road and with the aid of a neg scanner and a bit of digital pulling and stretching and tone adjustment and stuff, this is a cropped version which I think does this amazing facade justice. Finally.

Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film, scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

Heartbreak Hotel