Posted 15 October 2024 (Tue)
This was a family trip. We used to go to Australia (primarily Gold Coast) on family trips when I was a kid, and then kind of stopped before the 2000s I think, so I haven't been there for years and years now and was pretty excited to visit again. I don't think we'd been to Sydney either, so that was new. Honestly I think it was a bit of a waste that we didn't visit the Blue Mountains even though we'd talked about it before...but I feel that's just the family trip experience.
My X100VI (well, one of my preorders) finally arrived sometime in August, so this was my own unit. Again - it's a fun camera! It was great being able to move around without the weight of my DSLR and it made some really cool shots. The one issue I had was that I suddenly got into photographing birds and not having a zoom made it rather..........difficult. But that's what my DSLR is for I guess! I only brought it out on the last full day, so there aren't that many photos taken on it that aren't birds.
Speaking of - I have actually gone for years not really knowing how to use the manual controls on my DSLR, and it took practice with the Pentax K1000/X100VI that finally got me to absorb the exposure triangle (vaguely knew what it was, never put it into practice). It's actually difficult for me to switch back to auto now because I want control over everything...but I'm still new to manual on my DSLR, so some of my shots turned out pretty overexposed when I checked them on my PC. Still got things to learn...
Anyway, here's a mix of photos from both. All are unedited, and no pics of me or my family. About half of them are my quest to document every bird species I spotted...
Posted 5 June 2024 (Wed)
Part 2 of photos!! I received my scans today. Straight out of the camera, there were some issues with exposure, particularly on the Superia Premium - I remember being completely mystified about why the sunny 16 rule wasn't applying on a bright sunny day and both my camera/phone light meters were telling me to expose...more or less, I can't remember. Anyway, those photos turned out disappointingly unfortunate. However! With the power of technology (tone curve editing) I have salvaged a number of them :)
The Superia Premium was spent on the day we went to the Edo-Tokyo Architectural Museum, and the Ultramax on Hakone. Fun fact: I actually brought 3 rolls of film to use on 3 separate days, and managed to load the Ultramax roll wrong on Yokohama day, so no pictures ended up being taken on film that day and I returned with an unused roll. Really glad I had the X100VI on hand, so it wasn't a complete bust.
Photos uploaded have been edited for mainly contrast, and a few have been tweaked for saturation. The ones that didn't turn out great also have a bit more noise reduction applied, so the quality isn't fantastic. Still, they're pretty atmospheric and I like them.
Posted 25 May 2024 (Sat)
This year's Japan trip with friends (it seems to be a yearly thing now) was from May 11 to May 21! This is part 1, because I did have my Pentax with me on a couple of days, and I have not sent the rolls for development yet. A little backstory about the camera I used...
A few months back, 3 of us noticed the X100VI. One managed to get it from a reseller before the resale prices skyrocketed, the other two (including me) placed preorders a little too late because we were thinking about the price and didn't realise it was so popular...so even though we waited for about 2 and a half months, neither of us managed to get hold of it. The one I used for this trip was a rental camera, and they requested that I try to return the settings to their original state, so I didn't go ham on customising it.
I'm new to the Fujifilm system, so the idea of film simulations and recipes was very enticing and I did have a lot of fun with these. The ones I used most were:
All of these were inputted as-is except the clarity setting was always 0 because I didn't want the processing time. (There is indeed one more slot, but I ended up not really using the one I saved to that slot.) The rental came with a UV filter, but I swapped it for a Glimmerglass 1 filter (from my collection of accessories I bought for my own unit) pretty early on. Also for some reason I was using the camera in manual mode all the time - I guess I felt like I really wanted control over the exposure...
My thoughts on the camera are that I'm really glad I went with the rental. It wasn't exactly super compact after the camera bag's size was included, but it did what I wanted it to do - be easy to take in and out, be fun to take pictures with, make good pictures. I'm already missing it right now...can't wait for my own to arrive, whenever that might be.
As for the trip itself - which was brutal on the legs/feet, by the way - we spent most of the time in Tokyo, with a couple of day trips to Yokohama and Hakone. Our primary purpose was Design Festa on 18-19 May, but we did go to a lot of scenic spots for photos. We've been to Tokyo many times before, so in planning this trip we picked some places that not everyone in our group had been to yet, and also some of my...let's say...(relatively) secret favourite spots. Which was a good thing, because there were A Lot of tourists, and we managed to avoid a lot of crowds like this. More info in the descriptions of each picture...
Lastly...these are all straight out of camera :) I did save raws for once and there are some pictures I think would shine with a little bit of editing, but these are just as-is. I'm also not posting pictures of me and my friends.
Posted 9 February 2024 (Fri)
Up until the week before I went, I hadn't even heard of Peace Centre, and wasn't even certain about going up until late in the day before its last day open, but I was really glad I went. For those not in the know - Peace Centre is a defunct shopping mall that was repurposed into a community space. (More details in this Straits Times article.) In essence, it's a building that lived longer than it normally would have, and community-led events happened organically in the space, notably art-related ones. It remained open for activities up until the 28th of January (the day I went to visit), and at the time of writing, is slated for demolition at last. I honestly kind of regret not having heard about it up until then; it seems like something I would've really enjoyed checking out while it was open.
And how! Even my expectations for how the visit would go were completely subverted. I'd brought my camera along because I'd heard there was graffiti on the walls (a rarity in Singapore) and ended up taking photos I didn't think I would. My friend, who'd been there earlier in the day, told me there was stuff upstairs on the 4th floor (only the first 3 floors were open to the public), and so we (and a couple of our friends who were also there) hopped the barrier and went upstairs.
The photos aren't great, that's for sure - the lighting wasn't very conducive to anything and we were basically using our phone flashes to light the corridors. And as far as urban exploration goes, this was baby mode; it was noisy and crowded just a floor below, it was daytime, and it was dubious whether or not this place was even truly off-limits or if the signs were just for the sake of avoiding responsibility for injuries and the sort of people who would complain about that stuff. There were other curious people on the same floor, just checking the place out...taking cosplay photos...sometimes spray painting the shop windows. (To top it off, after I left, the building closed earlier than expected, with management citing vandalism in the 4th floor toilets...when there was broken glass on the floor in a corridor. The entire floor was vandalised, my dude...there were new words on a wall when I saw it the second time around. The toilets are the least of your concerns?)
Anyway, enjoy the photos. Some of these are in the public spaces on floors 1-3. The dark ones are from the 4th floor. Incidentally, the 5th floor was perfectly clean, if just deserted (which was somehow worse). The ripped ceilings, trashed rooms, etc. aren't due to the ravages of time - there was intentional destruction here (and a haunted house event at some point).
My closing thoughts are that I'm glad I got to experience this. Singapore is very...sanitised...to the point where it feels like we're very passive about political and social issues. You're not allowed to organise protests. You're not allowed to do graffiti unless specifically requested by the owner of the property. Don't rock the boat. Don't be loud. Don't do anything...weird. As my friend put it, it was really nice to get to be around weirdos like us for once. There was queer graffiti on the walls and graffiti in support of Palestine; notes anonymously confessing to petty crimes and people blatantly ignoring the "do not enter" signs. It was...art.
Posted 15 January 2024 (Mon)
In May 2023 I went on vacation with my friends to Japan - the first time in 4 years since I left. In that time so much had changed; it seemed like I'd mostly returned to my old life, but at the same time, it was different from how I lived it before. I think I was terribly anxious about how things in the placed I'd lived in had changed, if anyone remembered me, if they'd judge me for not using the educational experience for any practical purpose etc., but I think I found some closure on that front during this trip.
Anyway, that's not really related to the photos. As planned, we stayed for a few days in Kansai before moving up to Tokyo. During that time, my friends needed to visit a pharmacy, and I spotted some disposable cameras near the counter. These are the better photos I took with that one camera, developed at National Photo in Harajuku. We were pretty surprised by the quality and this directly led to 3 of us getting 35mm cameras LOL.
Posted 15 January 2024 (Mon)
How time flies! I didn't realise it'd been quite a while since I'd last made any project updates. I have been doing things in the meantime, but I guess they don't fit that neatly into my website, and I also...don't know how I'd make a status update on anything without also updating a project haha. (Great design)
Anyway - at the end of last year, I visited the Gardens to get some practice on my Pentax. There was some Christmas stuff going on, hence the lights. I think they came out great on the whole! I'm surprised even the night shots came out well; I was expecting those to be either too dark or suffering from hand shaky but they were all fine. There was one shot that came out blank and I don't know why, but even with that blank and a laughably glitched first shot, I got in an extra frame on the same roll so it's cool.
These are unedited photos (the scans I received without touchups), from the second and third rolls I took on that camera. The first roll (from a separate occasion, using Kodak Ultramax 400) came out with a lot of very underexposed shots, so I metered on the bright side for these ones (and used my phone to meter separately every now and then, just in case).