50mm

Little experiment. Faces of Tokyo on white.

So I have re launched the 50mm.jp website.
After a lot of playing around with different options I decided to keep pixelpost as the platform. Would have built it in wordpress but it was too difficult to make a seamless experience that handled images well, didn’t use flash, worked on the iphone and allowed you to track individual photo views on Google analytics.
The site does not contain all work I have done and I have not yet decided how I will approach the upload of new work but I’m hoping to keep it fresher than it has been in the recent past. If it (photo’s you have seen before by me) can’t be found on 50mm it could be located either on flickr or here. If there is an image you have seen that has gone missing please contact me and I’ll upload it to one of the 3 locations.
Any and all feedback more than welcome.

As so this is about where I am at the moment. The end of something and the beginning of something else. Here is hoping your journey from one thing to the next is an enriching one.

This shot is one I dug up from the archives again. To be featured in the upcoming update of the 50mm web site which hopefully should launch before the end of the year.

An afternoon off with the wife in the park in Autumn.

Mt. Mitake on the final leg of a rather good walk. Taken some time ago.

Sometimes you have to revisit the past to see if you missed anything. I think after a LONG hiatus I might be ready to revisit this genre. We’ll see. Anyway, was a bit of fun to hang with the lads and shoot a few pictures.

I tell you I’m a bit hacked off with this Ektar 100 film. This is the 2nd roll I’ve shot of the stuff and this time I pushed it 2 stops. Should be no issues given I push another neg film and have never had problems. I have, however, had issues with getting Ektar developed at Horiuchi Color before. SO, this time I figured I’d go to the source and get it done at Kodak. Well, the bloody neg has blotches all over it. Spend a good 20 mins touching the crap out of it to make it look half ok. The OTHER issue is that they decided to charge me 1449 for ONE roll! And this is development only. I must say, I do like the colours I managed to squeeze out of the film but not if I’m going to get bent over a table on the price and they do a shoddy job of it to boot (the development not bending you over a table. That they are good at).
I think I’ll have to give Ektar a miss from this point on. Shame.

See his genius at work here -> Uchujin
While I was in the film archives the other day I found a few shots I forgot to scan. A case that so often happens to me “ah, not bad, I’ll do that one last”. As usual, I forget or run out of time.
Figured it would be nice to add to the rest of the shots considering everyone else got a look-in a while back on the blog.

This is what I love about old cameras and film. You can’t plan this type of old feeling you get from this type of combination. The random combination of film age, film type, developer, fix, fix age, fix duration, developer duration etc. etc. all add up to a look that makes film special. You can photoshop all you want but you’re not going to get the same happy accidents you do when you play with the real thing.

Too busy to go out and make an effort to shoot anything.

Another archive shot while I work my way very slowly through a roll of film.

Shot taken from around here while on a bike ride around the mountains.
The Hasselblad is a bit heavy to lug around while trying to race up mountains so the Holga has become the substitute on rides. Can’t have great views and not shoot medium format!

Thanks to Manny Santiago for the REALLY old expired (march 2000) Fuji once again.

Caught him early one evening on the way home.

Man reads a morning newspaper. Caught on the edge of the frame with the Rolleiflex as I went to work.

Clemens shot in yoyogi.

AKA Manny Santiago, AKA…
Go see his new site here
Shot pulled from the archives.

Click image for larger view

From an ongoing series that doesn’t seem to have a beginning or an end. This guy at first glanced looked drunk but after closer inspection seemed to have something else wrong with him.
This was taken at about 8:45am which, as you can see from the onlookers reaction, gained a bit of attention. He managed to get on the train and pass out again and then somehow remembered his station and got off only to pass out again on the platform.
Never a dull moment in Tokyo.

Before I took some time off from shooting (something I badly needed) I was testing out an old Olympus Pen-s half frame camera. With all the talk of the new Olympus pen digital I thought I’d give the camera a try for the second time. My first attempts were not great as it doesn’t have a meter, has a shutter limit of 250th/sec and has a tiny ring where the aperture of the lens can be changed with a lot of effort. After more than a month on the shelf I thought I’d develop 2 of the films I’d shot with it to see what I had. I’ve not had a chance to go through them all yet but I did find this semi focused feel quite appealing. These 3 frames are actually taken in succession which, judging by the other frames further on in the film seems to be a reflection of my ability to gauge light and set the camera correctly. I think my speed judgment is off a bit but I’m not minding that I got these wrong

I’ll likely be posting experimental stuff up here for a bit while I get to work on the other projects I have lined up.