50mm

Inspired by one of Jon’s shots (You always give credit. I hate the way people take an idea from somewhere and pretend it’s theirs).
I thought I’d see what happens when you put your panoramic camera in a puddle while it’s raining. I’m going to claim the colour version now before someone rips me off and does it before I’ve developed my film (like it hasn’t already been done a millions times). More to follow at some stage when the film is ready.

Here he is on flickr

A wasted evening wasting film. C41 shot in Shinjuku station through a rangefinder and a 50mm lens. This could have been shot yesterday or 3 years ago. It’s now all the same to me.

Random collection of old shots from around Shinjuku and a few stations.

Sometimes the strangest elements all come together in a shot when you least expect them to.

So I managed to visit the Fragments of Tokyo exhibition at M Place in Shinjuku Gyoenmae and have to say I was impressed. Four very different styles of photography and each with a wonderful and different perspective of Tokyo.

If you missed it you’ll have to bug them to put on another show. Below is each members flickr stream although to really do any of these pictures justice you need to see them printed. It was really a different and exciting experience to see them printed and presented as a series. Congratulations to the four of you.

Toshiya Watanabe
Dairou Koga
Thomas Orand
Jon Ellis

I’ve kept this exhibition pretty close to my chest thus far. I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. It’s a very large group art selling festival (for want of a better description) which I’ve somehow managed to get myself involved in.
Despite it having a very department store like feel I have to say I’m enjoying the experience. The range of people that travel past the exhibits every day is staggering.
The other thing that has completely knocked my socks off is the price of some of the work on display. The most expensive piece I found was over $500,000US so there is quite a price range to be had.
I have been lucky enough to be included as one of only 2 photographers to be exhibiting and Mitsukoshi is, for the first time, including photography in their art exhibition (so I guess I should be feeling privileged).

If you have any interest the event is on till the 18th located on the 7th floor of the main Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi store (Mitsukoshimae station on the Ginza line).

Shot at about 5:55am on the 1st Jan 2010 in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Managed to wake up at 4 and leave at 4:20am. Never actually saw the sun but was lucky enough to get a bit of colour in the clouds before everything went a flat bright colour.
My next trip back there will be with a view to achieve something very different.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A shot from the mini world series from tha archives. This one has not seen the light of day yet.

Shot (like usual) on the way to work.