'Lady With A Shopping Trolley'

📸 Lomo LC-Wide
🎞️ LomoChrome Turquoise 35 mm ISO 100–400

It was July 2025, shortly after my vacation in Italy. I still had a few empty frames left on my roll of film and wanted to fill it up pretty quickly so I could finally send it to the lab to be developed. Since I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I drove to Sonthofen to snap a few standard urban Lomo shots. A few high-rises here, some traffic lights and streetlamps there—nothing special, really. Just as I was actually done and on my way back to the car, I noticed this older lady with her shopping cart on the sidewalk. She was coming toward me, and I thought to myself, “If I have room for one more shot, I’ll just snap it as she passes by.” To my surprise, I still had one exposure left. A few more people were coming up behind her, and since I was still pretty shy back then, I wanted to let it go at first. But then I thought to myself, “At some point, you just have to dare to do something like this. Go for it!”

What happened next was a physical contortion that was probably more embarrassing than simply turning around quickly and pressing the shutter button. After the lady had walked past me, I crouched down, the LC-Wide in my right hand behind my back, with my thumb on the shutter button. With my left hand, I pretended to fiddle with my shoelace, as if I needed to adjust something. I didn’t want the people in front of me to think I was taking a photo. Somehow, in the midst of this acrobatic and awkward posture—which looked anything but natural—I pressed the shutter button.

I was so embarrassed by the whole thing at that moment that I completely forgot about this photo. I don’t even want to know what the people in front of me were thinking.

And then, at some point, the film came back from the lab and I saw this photo again. I immediately had to laugh at myself, but I was still pretty proud of the result.

Thank you so much, dear lady, for the great subject!

And if those of you who were walking toward me back then can remember this situation, I hope you found my awkward pose amusing.