Mexico » Travel Photography » More PaperShoot Camera + Personal Updates

We’ve been exploring Mexico for nine months, have driven our car through 15 Mexican states, completed a handful of long road trips, and have begun our journey house-sitting. I’d say it’s time to take another look at some more PaperShoot camera photos!

You may (or may not) recall from my previous photo blog about the PaperShoot camera, that it’s literally just a circuit board in a paper case, designed to replicate the look and feel of the old wind-up disposable cameras many of us grew up with.

In adding this little pocket camera to my arsenal, my goals were: to capture fun and unique personal travel photos, while decreasing my cell phone camera use and screen time in general. I continue to be pleasantly surprised with the results of the PaperShoot camera, in a variety of lighting situations, including low-light. I actually find myself enjoying the fact that I don’t know if the photos actually turned out, or not. There is no screen to distract myself from the moment. I look through the viewfinder (which is just a hole in the paper case), click the shutter, and remain in the moment. It’s sort of magical in it’s simplicity.

I will say that, at this point, I find myself not using the four optional magnetic lenses (wide-angle, macro, radial effect, and prism effect) as much as I thought I would, and all of the photos in this blog are using the PaperShoot’s built-in standard lens. That being said, I do appreciate that I have them, in case the need arises. I will also say that, of the four color setting options (color, black and white, sepia-toned, and blue-toned), I find myself using regular ‘color’ more often than not. Once in a while, the little switch on the back will get bumped over to ‘black and white’, and it’s inevitably during a time I was taking photos specifically for the vibrant colors, so that’s always a bit disappointing later. I just prefer to have a little more control over the end result, and would like to make the ‘color’ or ‘black and white’ decision during post-processing. However, I have noticed that the ‘sepia-toned’ setting produces warmer skin tones, which is appealing for photos of people.

As always, when I boast about this camera, I’ll clarify: This is definitely not an ad, and I’m in no way affiliated, nor have I been gifted anything or monetarily compensated by PaperShoot. I just love the film quality of the photos, the affordable price tag, and the small light-weight size!

On a personal note, I’m happy to report that we’re well into the house-sitting phase of our travels, and it’s really going well. So far, we’ve booked eight back-to-back house-sits for a total of eight solid months! We’re currently in León, Guanajuato, then we’ll be back south to Oaxaca for the fall. We have a lot of big life decisions to make: we’re currently in the process of applying for business visas in Japan, which may or may not be granted by mid-2023, as Japan is much more difficult to immigrate to. Also, our temporary residency in Mexico will be up for renewal soon, which we intend to keep until we can qualify for permanent residency in 2025. These bureaucratic processes take time and patience, so being able to spend our days in comfortable homes, with a variety of fuzzy or feathered friends to keep us company, is a real treat.

For our own long-term life plans, we plan to rebuild our homestead, start our family, and shift our urban farming business focus more towards beekeeping with agro-tourism. Of course, photography will always be part of the plan! If we end up in rural Japan, where property is actually much more affordable than Mexico, we have our eye on a couple fixer-upper ryokans (historic inns). We have a number of akiya (abandoned) homes, with many acres of forest and farmland, that we’re looking at very closely. We would be happy in any of the rural subtropical areas, and surprisingly, there’s an overwhelming number of homes that meet our land and budget requirements, on the islands of Kyushu, Shikoku, and a few other prefectures with climates similar to (or more tropical than) New Orleans. Alternatively, if we end up staying in rural Mexico, we really think we’ll settle in the state of Oaxaca, Chiapas, or Tabasco. These three states have areas with lots of rainfall, lush vegetation, and even real rainforests! So, depending on what the future holds, we hope to find our way to explore those states extensively, soon.

If you’re interested in following along with this aspect of our life, feel free to check out Benton Homestead » Uprooted on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. Those pages focus on our travels, house-sitting, dash-cam driving videos, and our “search for home” in Mexico or Japan.

Back to the photos: I’ve decided to present these photos to you in a pseudo random order, without my usual commentary. When I sat down to write descriptions, I felt like it was better to just let the photos speak for themselves. So, I present to you, a curated assortment of images from the towns and cities of Aculco, Mexico state; Atlixco, Puebla; Bernal, Querétero; CDMX; Cholula, Puebla; Guanajuato, Guanajuato; Mazatlán, Sinaloa; Mineral del Monte, Hidalgo; Puebla, Puebla; San Andrés Huayapam, Oaxaca; and the El Cerrito Pyramid in Santiago de Querétero, Querétero.

Many thanks to my dear husband, who is always willing to lug around my excess camera gear, wear my camera backpack, or carry my cup of coffee, so I can take pictures hands-free. I simply could not do life without him.

Without any further adieu, please, enjoy a small sample of Mexico!

You can find more of our travel and house-sitting adventures, here:
Dani & Evan Benton | Benton Homestead | www.bentonhomestead.com
Currently traveling Mexico » Soon, rebuilding our homestead in Japan »
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Mexico » Travel Photography » More PaperShoot Camera + Personal Updates

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