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In early February I went to Cuba for 10 days of photography. Long before I left I knew what I wanted to accomplish. I’d been to Cuba 10 years before, so I knew the basics of what I’d see and what I could expect. This time I narrowed down what I wanted to photograph. I wanted to shoot mostly in the old section of Havana and in the city of Trinidad. People would be my main subjects—people on the streets, in their homes, going about their lives. In Old Havana I wanted to work in the late afternoon and early evening; in Trinidad I wanted to capture people against colorful backgrounds. On this trip there wouldn’t be open country where I’d be shooting landscapes or people working in the fields; there’d be no wide-open spaces, no photos of tobacco fields or expanses of sugar cane.

Traveling in winter on the train from Dresden, Germany, the mostly overcast countryside zipped by as the train quickly moved along on its way to our destination in Prague, Czech Republic. Occasionally the sun peeked out from the clouds and lit up the houses and the industrial areas we traveled through. At first I thought my images might be impaired by a too slow shutter speed and the reflection in the train windows, but I quickly decided to use those problems to my advantage. The photos I ultimately made (and named “Views From the Train”) clearly indicate movement, low light, and reflections; qualities that mirror both the literal and metaphorical aspects of the country we traveled through.

Polaroid was not the first company to try instant photography. Back in the daguerreotype and wet plate days, patents were granted for cameras in which the plate could be developed inside the body. But it wasn’t until 1864 that the first commercially successful instant picture camera came to the market.

The Sony A65 is a feature-reduced version of the company’s A77 model. It offers a nominal resolution of 24MP (just like the A77). The A65 uses Sony’s SLT system, which combines a semi-translucent mirror system and an electronic viewfinder. The semi-translucent mirror reflects a part of the light to the Phase Detection AF sensor, which is located in the penta-prism bulge on the top of the body and allows for very fast focusing. At the same time, the image sensor is able to generate a digital live preview for the LCD on the back or on the mini LCD screen of the ELV. Both monitor systems use high-resolution LCDs. The large monitor on the back offers 921,600 RGB dots; the AMOLED ELV offers 2.3 million dots for a brilliant and crisp image.