Downtown, Midmorning

I don’t remember why I was downtown in the middle of a Monday morning, but I suspect I was heading to the supermarket and dallied to make a few photos.
It was a bright morning with no clouds around so contrast was quite high. Since everything was so bright and shiny, I decided to set the camera to vivid mode and get some strong colours.

Power, Internet, and cable lines are all buried on Gangneung’s main streets and tourist areas, but it will probably take some years before that sort of work gets done on side streets. With the clutter of shop signs, it probably won’t look much neater even after the poles are gone.

Although brightly coloured, this sign is quite simple and neat against the brick wall.

A compose and wait photo. It took a few tries to adjust the exposure so that the sunlight on the ground was very bright but not overblown and the shadows were dark but not gone to black. I made about four photos of this woman and then chose the one that showed both her hand and her feet in stride.

All these were made on my Nikon D810 and 50mm 1.8G lens.

Fate

I may have mentioned this photograph in a post or in a reply to a comment. This photo was made during my Things-About-the-House phase. It’s a little bit silly, but I like to look at it. I like the contrast between the warm shell of the egg and the cool shadow of the spatula.

From the Archive: Experiments

I started taking photography classes soon after arriving in Gangneung, and my enthusiasm for photography led me to try out things at home. Usually they were failures, but the point of experimenting is to get the bad stuff behind you and learn what works.

My photo teacher thought that this photo was amateurish and didn’t like it much. Maybe, but I still like it eleven years on. I set up the camera in front of this triangle of light on the balcony wall and asked the missus to hold her hand in front of the camera. Then I held my hand so that its shadow fell across her hand. Hours of fun.

I’m not sure what this second photo is about. I titled it “Tomato Awaits its Fate” back in 2007, which is an admittedly dumb title. I might have been experimenting with lines and points at the time and came up with this. It’s not a great photo, but I think I kept it t remind me that I should keep trying new things. Especially important these days when I seem to keep going to the same locations over and over.

Foma 400

Last month I got some Foma 400 back from the lab. There weren’t many usable photos on the rolls. Partly because of my poor skills and partly because the film quality can be dodgy at times. The edges are lighter than the rest of the frame or there are slight spots here and there. It’s not the lab and it’s not the camera because other films turn out fine. Here are a few of the photos worth posting here.

This scene is on the way to my university, on the short-cut over the hill. I’d like to make this photo again with my X-T3, perhaps in square format.

No, I didn’t buy a new panorama camera and turn it on its side. This is obviously heavily cropped because there was nothing of interest to the left and right of this plant.

Some businesses will buy a shipping container and have windows installed so they can use them as offices. This one was painted yellow (not so obvious here 🙂 ), though most places just leave them depressingly grey.

I liked the strong shadows here so I made a photo. LPG is how many homes get their cooking fuel. The tanks are usually kept out behind the house. Many have rust spots. They are delivered by madmen in pickup trucks.

I wish I had used Tri-X instead of Foma, but I was trying to find ways to cut down on film costs. A mistake . . . .