X-Pro1 Diaries: Arab Street Redux with VSCO

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

My latest purchase is the VSCO presets for Aperture and I’m absolutely loving them. I started my photography ‘back in the film days’ and film still evokes a strong sense of nostalgia for me. For reasons of ease and finance, I seldom shoot film now but still love the ‘film look’. Visual Supply Co. are folks that create pretty authentic ‘film look’ presets for use in both Adobe Lightroom and Aperture. The presets are nothing like the over -the-top Instagram ‘vintage toy camera’ look that is all the rage on Facebook these days, but an altogether more realistic film simulation. Although part of my brain sees a contradiction between buying a camera with a high tech digital sensor outputting clean, low noise pictures and applying presets to degrade and add ‘grain’ to the pristine image, I just can’t help myself. Perfection is overrated anyway.

What I like about the Aperture presets is the fact that its a preset, not a plugin - a subtle but important difference. Nik produces fantastic plugins but I resent having to output huge tiff files from my master images to work off, the VSCO presets work natively in Aperture, creating no huge tiff files to clog up my hard drive with, and are as non destructive as any of the other image adjustments one might employ in Aperture. At the moment, there is a range of Kodak and Fujifilm film colour negative as well as black and white presets to choose from, I have word from VSCO that they are working on colour transparency emulations for future release. My favourite films from ‘back in the day’ are Fuji Velvia 50, Provia 100F, Fuji NPH 400 (negative), Kodak 100VS and Fuji Neopan 1600 (b/w). Hopefully VSCO will work on having these looks available soon. 

Kampong

Caution, One Way

Father and son portrait

A cat in the grass, probably thinks he’s a lion stalking prey

Giving the wink

”It was exactly this long …’

Mannequin massacre

Portrait of a plastic man

Headless

Lady in Red

Authorised Personnel Only

Conversations in the alley

Salmin and Co.

Giving me the eye

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

X-Pro1 Diaries: Things I See When I Am Out And About (May 2012)

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

Oh to be invisible in a sea of humanity, in the sprawl of the city, a little whisper in a roaring wave. I wander, looking, observing, recording. For what purpose am I doing this? For whom is this photographic record intended? I don’t exactly know. Something compels me. Perhaps it is the most obvious way to share my view of the world around me, one that is at once beautiful and grotesque, serendipitous and staged, symmetrical and chaotic.

For now, I am merely the record keeper.

The lion

Looking over

Synchronised shooting

Queuing for fortune

The man in the alley

Delivering Ya Pear

The new and the not so new

Zero emissions

Hmmm… I wouldn’t mind a yellow Porsche either …

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

X-Pro1 Diaries: Friday Night in a Quieter Part of Town

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

Whilst the city centre is thronging with the working crowd looking to purge the stresses of the week from their minds, in a quiet corner of Joo Chiat, a residential conservation area in the East of Singapore, the mood is hardly any different from any other evening. A bit too out of the way for the town dwelling financial industry types and office workers, it is decidedly, a little bit more blue collar. A couple share an ice cream sitting on the street bollards chatting, mom-and-pop shop owners went about tending their businesses, a little girl amuses herself skating around on a supermarket trolley and a pair of ladies stand waiting for a taxi, perhaps to take them to a more exciting party downtown.

Just another evening in Joo Chiat.

All photos taken with the Fuji X-Pro1 and XF 35mm f1.4

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

Plastic Fantastic

(photo taken with Canon 50E, Kodak Elitechrome 100 Cross Processed)

Let me take a second to cut and paste the image of her hips, Alysa’s upper body, Lisa’s lips and Cassandra’s lower back onto a canvas that is already completed. Because skin bleach is just a Ctrl Alt Delete to being born the wrong colour. We can fix it! Says the man with the overly white smile - and he can fix those too. Teeth. Cheeks. Because they are supposed to gleam unrealistically. Chins were meant to have sharp cuts. Thighs aren’t supposed to touch. The love we’re supposed to satisfy ourselves with; let me take a moment to trim that incase it adds to my jean size. I can try to find it through someone else. Later. Nature got it wrong the first time around, so we cut ourselves open.

Conversations by the Window Seatis an ongoing creative collaboration between Adrian Seah and Romila Barryman, with photos and writing themed around a common love of travel and discovery.

View other Conversations by the Window Seat or read more of Romila’s writing at her blog Daydreamsonlooseleafpaper

X-Pro1 Diaries: Sleepy Weekends and Long Brunches

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

Brunches are made for weekends, like ‘peas and carrots’ (as Forrest Gump puts it), a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, unless one doesn’t work (in the conventional sense of the word), the concept of brunch on a weekday is nigh on impossible. Between scoffing down breakfast in the morning and a quick lunch later on, the two sessions of sustenance are more functional than enjoyable. Brunches, however, are a different story. The lazy and chilled out offspring of prim and proper Breakfast and high strung Lunch, Brunches are usually a long, languishing affair involving any combination of food, coffee, newspapers, magazines, idle conversation or simply staring into space. Brunches are by far my favourite type of meal, and I seldom turn down an opportunity to indulge in one.

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

Crossing the Road in Hanoi and Other Rips in the Space Time Continuum.

Crossing the road in Hanoi is an act of faith, one must be imbued with the deep confidence  and belief that despite the red flags violently waving in a primitive self preservative part of your brain, that it is indeed ‘safe’ to cross. The realisation that you are no longer in control of your life and wellbeing when you cross the road is both liberating and zen like. Unlike elsewhere in the world, where one might wait for a break in traffic before crossing the said road, in Hanoi, the traffic never stops, a constant, monotonous flow coursing through the veins of the city, the motorcycles like salmon migrating upstream.

The only way then, is to simply step off the relative safety of the pavement, and begin the walk across to the other side, and suddenly, almost as miraculously as the parting of the Red Sea, slowly, the never ending stream of motorcycles will suddenly start making space for you, weaving their way around you as you cross, sort of like how a river might wend its way gently around a rock placed in the stream. The whole process is rather ‘gentle’, if such a term can be used in this context, and without fuss. The only trick is to keep walking, and at a constant pace. As long as your movements are predictable, the traffic makes space for you.

Never, at any moment start running across, or worse still, stop. The resulting effect is not unlike a rip in the space time continuum, where chaos starts to take over, the oncoming traffic cannot predict your speed and where you will be and that causes erratic swerving and evasive manoeuvres, which is very bad news in a stream of motorcycles closely packed together. The effect of this is accumulative, with nearby vehicles swerving to avoid hitting the other motorbikes. Like ripples spreading out from a stone that is thrown in the previously calmly flowing river, the effect spreads outwards and that’s when an accident might actually happen. All because some tourist had the audacity to stop!

Fortunately, this rarely happens, most people quickly get the hang of it and are absorbed into the flow.

A bust of Uncle Ho

Reflection off a motorcycle wing mirror

Summary execution

Oral hygiene

Mass at St Joseph Cathedral

Street scene, Hanoi

Woman playing Tetris

Captive audience

Water rides at West Lake

Ubiquitous transport

Post no bills

View the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

X-Pro1 Diaries: On Queen Street with the XF 60mm f/2.4 R

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

OK, I gave in and finally bought the last piece of the puzzle, the XF 60mm f/2.4 R Macro short telephoto/macro lens for my X-Pro1. With this purchase, also comes my tacit admission that manual focussing just isn’t for me. I was hoping to use my Leica 50mm Summicron with the Kipon adaptor as my short telephoto lens equivalent but I admit I have been spoilt by AF over the years, and MF just doesn’t happen fast enough for me to be usable in unpredictable situations, especially coupled with the fact that unless a gun was pointed to my head, I would typically be shooting wide open, which pretty much rules out zone focussing. I admit, manual focussing works for some people, and some people actually enjoy it, but for me, it spoils my flow. Now, the XF 60mm has a reputation of having the slowest AF of the current Fuji X mount stable, that is like saying someone is the slowest in a class of slowcoaches, but any AF is better than no AF as far as I’m concerned, and the good thing is, the XF 60mm is also renowned for being the best optical performer of the X lenses. Slow and steady wins the race they say! I find the AF speed on the slow side but still acceptable in decent light (I haven’t yet tried it extensively in low light), and since I upgraded the firmware the moment I bought the lens, I’ve never heard a chirp out of this lens.

More pictures to follow in the days ahead!

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

X-Pro1 Diaries: Down By The River

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

It was a sweltering day, despite the tropical thunderstorm in the morning. By noon, the puddles of water on the pavements and roads had all but dried up, leaving no evidence that just a couple of hours before, it was raining down cats, dogs and other assorted animals. The heat from the ground formed a swirling haze and people took shelter in the relative cool of the shade.

With the arrival of evening and the dropping of the mercury, like moles coming out of their holes at night, people began to linger outside by the river. The air was still thick with residual heat and humidity but was not unbearable.

Queues began to form up for ice creams, couples sat by the banks of the river chatting, and yet others began arriving for a saturday night out in town.

All by the river.

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

X-Pro1 Diaries: Things I See When I Am Out And About

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

These days, my trusty X-Pro1 is with me nearly everywhere I go, from popping out for a quick dinner, to watching Wicked! at the weekend, even to work, where it gets to go out for brief lunchtime shoots with me. It is such a luxury to have a camera with me at all times without breaking my back from the weight of lugging around a huge lump of magnesium alloy and glass.

This has in turn, meant that I am shooting things and situations which I normally only observe and wished I had a camera with me. All manner of randomness that life presents to one on a daily basis, juxtapositions of people and places, things, colours, light and shadows, all fleeting, and showing up at the most unexpected moments. Now, I am prepared, X-Pro1 in hand (not a 5D markII in a cabinet at home), to freeze these moments in a dance of 1’s and 0’s for posterity.

Everything is interesting if one would only be open enough, cast out preconceptions, refresh jaded eyes. All that is old is new again, be a tourist in your own town. Decidedly, it is not easy, for humans have the tendency to tune out white noise, anything that is ‘normal’ and regular, will at some point be tuned out, becoming a sensory wallflower, overlooked and ignored.

But look hard enough, and its all there - the comic, the tragic, the mundane and the plain beautiful. Only if you would but look.

View the rest of my ongoing X-Pro1 experiences and photos or the rest of the photos on Handcarry Only

Inhale. Exhale.

(photo taken with Leica M7, 50mm Summicron, Kodak 100VS)

But minds can’t be blank. Neither can hearts. Neither can school yards, or kitchens; once in a while you stumble across some who are. Blank. He used to put up empty canvases in his room. For a brief moment he could feel his mind breathe. But it was silly they told him. Things were meant to be filled. Of course they were, he thought with eyebrows raised, like passports and pages, so they may turn to books; like lady bug wings; like starry skies. But hearts and minds were not things. How peculiar, he would ponder. How dangerous it became; as time moved on he forgot. As life moved on he deteriorated. His heart, that is. His mind. Him. Among each traffic light, each lamp post, each signage. Finger Lickin’ G- 50% OFF Furniture Tod- Make a Better Deci-

Perhaps it was the black background that spotlighted the contrast. Perhaps it was the little boy in him that stayed ignited. But he had to gasp for air at the sight of the blue. He irises drank the view at the glimpse of blank. He stopped the car. He watched the plane pass by, the birds on occasion. He breathed.

Conversations by the Window Seatis an ongoing creative collaboration between Adrian Seah and Romila Barryman, with photos and writing themed around a common love of travel and discovery.

View other Conversations by the Window Seat or read more of Romila’s writing at her blog Daydreamsonlooseleafpaper