Halfway through our 16-day hike through the Nepalese Himalayas, at the highest altitude and on our only rest day, I was unceremoniously liquified by a gut bug. The timing was as good as the views. While I shivered in bed choking down electrolytes, plain rice and intermittent cups of tea, the panoramic views on the other side of the dusty window and breezy wooden walls called louder and louder.

My recipe for Imodium is to go hard early so hopefully, everything goes harder earlier. Six up front and ask questions later. I’m a high functioning coffee addict and come from a family of three-per-dayers so I’m never that concerned about overdoing it with bowel blockers. I’d packed a bag full of cameras for this trip around the Annapurna Circuit.

The most decadent camera was a vintage Lomography Horizon 202 panoramic camera manufactured between 1991 and 2003. It has a 28mm f2.8 swing lens that captures negative 24x 58mm photographs on 35mm film. What does all that mean? Well, a normal 35mm negative is 24 x 36mm so the Horizon 202 gives you a much longer negative, which makes it feel more cinematic – think widescreen movies. The swing lens is super fun. You set your aperture and shutter speed and there’s a tiny spirit level on top. Photos come out sharpest if the camera is level because once you push the shutter button, the camera whirrs like an old wind up toy and the lens swings around to capture 120° field of view.

I found mine on Gumtree for $40 and hadn’t put a roll of film through it before the trip but it looked like it was in mint condition and everything seemed to be working. I was optimistic and happy to burn a couple of rolls of film through it and am glad I did. Few better places come to mind to test a panoramic camera than scraping the sky in the Himalayas with an uninterrupted view of the world’s seventh tallest mountain – the mouthful Dhaulagiri (8,187m) – and back south towards the town of Pokhara.

This series, captured in the Nepalese Himalayas embodies why I love shooting film nearly perfectly. And a huge part of it is that it’s not perfect. Shooting film is as reliable as my memory – often blurry, grainy, random hairs where you don’t want them, too much or too little light and both my fault – in a word, unreliable. I love looking at super crisp, hyper hi-res digital photos but nowhere near as much as the soft, warm imperfection of film photos. Film looks like the memories I see in my head. The colours are better, colour gradients are more perfect than those early 00s computer backgrounds. Roaming through film photographs are the best physical representation of reminiscing and reliving memories. My memory isn’t as sharp or pixel perfect as digital photos – they feel hyper-real, un-real, not always unreal.

The first film photographs I remember seeing were photos Dad took on a hike he did through Nepal in the 1970s. He had three printed and mounted on chipboard – the sides painted black. The photos could’ve fallen out of National Geographic. Huge snow-capped mountains loomed in the backgrounds and valleys plunged impossibly far below. It looked make believe and unwittingly inspired an ongoing love of film photography and walking around mountains.