Zoo Flowers
Sunflower in the Sun
Hey there everybody. There’s not too much going on these days. The week before last we had some unseasonably crappy weather which stopped me from taking a short trip to the coast to take some landscape photos, and then I had a tattoo touched up, which kept me sitting at home and avoiding getting sweaty and moving about too much for the better part of a week. Which all means I’ve been bored for about 10 days or so. I haven’t been completely home-bound, I’ve gotten some more street photography done, with a roll of b&w in being processed right now, and about half a roll of Velvia used up.
Aside from that I have a couple of flower photos to post at least. I recently bought a bunch of crappy film, 10 rolls of ISO-200 Kodak ColorPlus, and 10 rolls of ISO-400 Fuji Superia, so I could test out my cameras’ meters and also just play around, experimenting with ideas while not having to worry about wasting a roll of Velvia, which costs about $10 here. I went to the local zoo, which also doubles as a botanical gardens of sorts, and took some macro shots of flowers to test out my meter. These two shots were my favorites. The sunflower pic is cliche as hell, but I like how I caught the blue tones in the background that contrast with the yelllow so well.
Cannonball Flower
A Weekend in Ben Tre (part 2)
Ben Tre woman I met coming over a little bridge, Fujifilm Provia 100F
I had convinced myself I was going to wake up at 6:30am and start shooting if the weather was nice, and do some exercise if it wasn’t. I did, in fact wake up in time, stagger to my door, and look out at the grey, hazy morning sky. That’s as far as I got. I happily got back in bed, vaguely hoping for better weather later in the day, and distinctly hoping for my headache to go away. Happy New Year, indeed.
Thankfully the weather and my pulsing head both improved, at least marginally, and around 10:30am our guide took us on a long walk over to another island so we could check out an old house. Read more »
A Weekend in Ben Tre (part 1)
Window on the Vinh Hue police station, shot on Fujifilm Velvia 100F
New Year’s is not my favorite holiday. It never has been. In my experience, New Year’s Eve seems to be this holiday where every idiot under the sun figures they have an excuse to go out and be loud, drunk and obnoxious in celebration of what is really just an arbitrary date which no longer even correlates to the lunar cycle, thanks to the Gregorian calendar. I don’t usually make special plans for NYE, and this year was no exception. I was at home alone, and went to bed about 5 minutes after midnight. Whoopee, it’s 2010, goodnight.
About a week before the auspicious date of January 1 arrived, however, my friend Adam invited me to go down to the Mekhong Delta for a few days with him and a group of his friends. I hadn’t been out of the city in months, and the quiet and fresh air were sounding really, really nice, so I decided to take a couple of extra days off of work and head down there with them. Thank God! Read more »
Agfa APX
Chinese fortune telling sticks in a shop in Cho Lon
Playing with different kinds of film is fun. Lord knows I don’t really need any new excuses to go out and take more photos, but deciding that I need to test out different types and brands of film has made it easy for me to justify spending my hard earned cash, and helped me feel good about blowing off other responsibilities while I wander around and do my ‘research’. Read more »
The Last Morning of 2009
What I woke up to on the last day of 2009
Well, 2010 is here. Whoopee. Hope you all didn’t make an ass of yourself over New Year’s weekend.
I had a great time myself! I spent the night of December 30th at my good buddy Tim’s apartment in Binh Thanh district of Saigon with the plan of waking up at the ass crack of dawn on Dec. 31st and getting some great dawn photos of the city from the roof of his building. His apartment building is 18 stories tall, and it the tallest building for a long, long ways, with nothing surrounding it but urban sprawl. I’d never been up on the roof for sunrise or sunset, but I figured it must be fantastic. I wasn’t disappointed.
I shot one roll of Fuji Velvia 100F and one roll of Kodak Elite Chrome so I could compare the results. Fuji thumped Kodak squarely on the nose, and I can assure you that once I shoot through the couple rolls of Kodak Elite that I have left, I’ll be sticking with Fuji slide film from here on out.
These shots look better the bigger you see them, so I decided that while I’m only going to show off 5 shots from this morning’s shoot, I would still load them as a gallery album so you all can see them a bit larger. Click here or on the photo above to see the series.
I’ve got lots more stuff from the weekend to upload – I tried to get it up sooner, but I couldn’t get my gallery app to browse my computer for content. I eventually figured out that the version of the app I’m using and Flash Player 10 don’t play nice together. Anyhow, problem solved now, and more coming soon. Happy New Year everybody! May you have 365 sunrises as nice as the last one for 2009 was for me.
Playing With Fuji Provia
Anais Shooting a Game of Checkers
This morning I went for another walk in the Cho Lon area of Saigon, this time with my new buddy Anais. Anais just recently got herself a new Canon 500d with a 50mm f/1.8 lens attached to it, and wanted to play around with her new toy. I set a goal for myself as we set out, which was quite simple: shoot through a roll of Fuji Provia 100F film to test it for colors and skin tones. Read more »
A Walk With Chi
Cho Lon Alley
I took a walk with Chi the other day in the Cho Lon area of Saigon. Chi is my best friend in Vietnam. I always love hanging out with her, and she likes to shoot film like I do now, so we had quite a bit of fun. Cho Lon overlaps district 5 and district 6, and the name means “Big Market” in Vietnamese. It’s what we Western folks refer to as “Chinatown”. It’s interesting for a million different reasons, and there’s a million different things to take pictures of there, however on this day I mostly did portraits of people on the street. Read more »
Starting Over
Old Doorway
I feel, much like the name of this post implies, that I’m almost completely starting over with photography now that I’ve decided to shoot only film. Over the last week I’ve spent a few days wandering around and taking shots almost at random. Not only am I experimenting with color film to see what the differences are in different brands, I’m also getting used to shooting in black and white, and playing around with some fixed focal length lenses that are new to me. Specifically, I’m using a 50mm Nikon f/1.4 AI lens that’s very nice, but also super contrasty and I’m figuring out where and when I can use it effectively. Simply using fixed focal length is a challenge for me as well, as I’m a spoiled little brat who is far too used to his zoom lenses. I’ve got 3 cameras to shoot with now so I can keep different lenses mounted or have various films loaded and ready, however 2 of them are in the shop getting prettied up. That makes it a bit difficult for me to take multiple shots for comparisons, however that will come next week. My mornings are open for a week or so, so I’m praying for good weather early in the day. Read more »
Sick of Digital Photography
Fujifilm Yellow
Yes, it’s true. Digital photography begins to wear thin for me. My beautiful, shiny Nikon D3 with it’s 1 megapixel LCD, it’s massive, crystal clear viewfinder, ultra-fast, ultra-accurate autofocus, blah blah blah… It became boring. Read more »
Ratatat #1
I know it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything. Let it suffice to say I’ve been extremely busy, and unfortunately none of that busy time has been spent taking photos. However, I got out this weekend for Loretofest, an all afternoon/night music festival put on by Loreto, a locally based charity organization. Several bands played, some of which I liked very much, some of which I did not. My favorite of the evening was the main act, Ratatat, from New York City. Read more »