minolta Af C – Hong Kong Lucida

Shanghai Monochrome: On Finding Your Street in Street Photography

Posted on July 8, 2014July 17, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome, Uncategorized

I was in Shanghai last week and so, quite naturally, I brought along 3 cameras.

Assuming the scans turn out fine, we’ll have quite a few posts on Shanghai.

A warm up shot while hiding behind a pole.

Quite literally, this is street photography.

I walked up and down the same street for about an hour, happily snapping away.

This is Huashan Road on a weekend mid-morning.

There’re lots of malls along this road.

I was told this is where Shanghai people do their shopping, whereas those malls at Nanjing Road are for clueless tourists.

I suppose a shot like this is not too difficult.

While I was in his face, his attention was elsewhere.

It’s amazing how people (myself included) are generally unaware of other people.

I was distracted (only) momentarily by the yummy international (check out the flags) street food… but resist I must.

After all, as a street photographer, I need to know myself.

I have yet to master Level Nine of Street Photography Kungfu, which involves taking photographs while munching on a chicken wing.

I hear that very few people attain this level in their lifetime.

Shanghai people are known for their very cosmopolitan dress sense.

People here are generally very stylish.

Handbags do matter, as my wife tells me.

There goes a happy couple.

Another strolling couple.

Teenagers out for a walk.

A street vendor selling handmade miniature bicycles.

I chatted with him for a bit – he says it takes 4 hours to make one, and they go for 40RMB, in case I’m interested.

I assume they’re policemen – they always walk in pairs.

I’m right in front of them with my camera, and they seem quite used to having their photographs taken.

They’re actually quite friendly, as many people stop them to ask for directions.

The advice though, needs a bit of work. Once in a while, I hear them say “walk in that direction for a bit and ask someone there”.

People at work – I’m quite proud of the composition here. The bodies are pointing to the centre, guiding the eyes to where the boss is.

Ladies chatting.

Scooters, motorbikes and bicycles are very popular modes of transport here.

There’re special lanes for bikes and scooters.

A scooter on the road.

A scooter on the pavement.

Scooters and bikes parked on the pavement, with an attendant.

Interesting scooter handles. That’s a good hack.

This person spotted me and stared for a bit.

Naturally, I responded with the street photographer’s standard operation procedure.

I fumbled with my camera, tried to look confused, and uttered a few choice words in a lesser-known Klingon dialect

All images here were taken with my relatively hard-to-find Minolta Af-C with an unbelievably accurate meter, loaded with the acclaimed chromogenic BW film, Ilford XP2 400.

They’re all from the same roll of film.

The light was good that day.

For collectors: a few images here are available at my Saatchi Art page as affordable open edition prints.

Thanks for coming by!

Many Hong Kongs

Posted on June 9, 2014June 17, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

These are images taken with the same camera (Minolta AF-C), with a single roll (Fuji Neopan 400CN), over a week or two.

There’re just so many environments, and so many stories waiting to be told.

There’s the early riser.

The joy of a youthful busker.

The necessities of life: public laundry.

There’s discipline and teamwork.

Political consciousness.

Work.

And work.

(For collectors: open edition prints from this post are available here.)

Analysis Paralysis

Posted on June 6, 2014 by eddietay in Colour, Monochrome

Street photography can be an obsessive endeavour…

One day, I was walking around and I saw this.

And I did another take just in case.

And I went, oops, oops, there’s a bit of condensation on the lens.

Hence the slight foggy effect.

And again, after wiping the lens.

Hmm … the left leg is slightly out of frame.

And again, after zooming out with my feet …

Better, I think.

Check out the stark clarity of the pavement.

Hmm … that’s a Minolta Af-C camera loaded with Neopan 400CN.

Let’s see what my Contax TVS camera loaded with Venus 800 would look like.

Here we go again, after I’ve rummaged through my bag for a bit.

And again.

One last time, I promise.

The image reminds me of a line I wrote in a poem: “It takes ten years to cultivate a tree, a century for a human being”.

It’s from a Chinese proverb “shi2 nian2 shu4 mu4, bai3 nian2 shu4 ren2”.

The things we do in the name of art …

The best camera is the one you have with you

Posted on May 23, 2014June 17, 2014 by eddietay in Colour

I do have a routine, and go to the same few places time and again.

These are all taken within a week or so on the same roll of film, with my Minolta AF-C loaded with Kodak ColorPlus 200.

My usual haunts are Shamshuipo and Wu Kai Sha beach.

That’s a cooking stove by a village house along Wu Kai Sha beach.

They say the best camera is the one you have with you.

I have cult rangefinders such as the Canonet QL 17 GIII, Yashica GX and the Leica M6.

But nowadays I’m in a point-and-shoot and snapshot-aesthetics phase.

So it’s either a Contax TVS, Olympus XA2, or Minolta AF-C.

These are to me signs of life, these ropes and bricks, arranged as if for display.

Sometimes, I strike up a conversation with people with my broken Cantonese.

This gentleman runs a BBQ site at Wu Kai Sha beach. He was trying to convince me to book a BBQ pit for my family for the coming weekend and as a bonus, he would throw in a few complimentary pieces of cuttlefish.

At Shamshuipo. That’s one of my favorite pit stop. Whenever I walk past, I’d try to take a shot.

It seems we oscillate between desire and labour all the time.

We discipline ourselves to make sure the plumbing works.

The Artistic Process: On Being in the Zone

Posted on March 29, 2014April 30, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

Street photography can get addictive.

Sometimes it’s the challenge, because you’re setting yourself up to be unobtrusive.

My cameras are all very small. My Minolta AF C and Olympus XA 2 look like plastic toys so people don’t take me seriously even when they spot me.

Sometimes you want to be spotted. It adds drama to the scene.

Sometimes you’re right in their faces but they can’t be bothered … this man saw me with my camera pointing at him and went on doing what he was doing…

I get out and walk and get “in the zone”. It’s a subjective (but common enough) experience.

For me, it happens when I’m writing or reading or when I’m teaching, when I’m fully immersed in the experience without any sense of self-consciousness.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, one of my favourite essays on writing poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote (among other things) on the artistic process:

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

And he goes on to say:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Writing, reading, teaching, and street photography are ways of getting myself outside of myself. It’s a way to silence that inner voice at the back of my head so that I’m not second guessing and talking to myself all the time.

Anyone who wants to be good at what he or she does (especially though not necessarily in the field of the arts) ought to read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

He uses the word “flow” to describe that happy state of being engaged in endeavours such as artistic creation, athletics, scientific tinkering, and so on, to map out relationships between learning, enjoyment and satisfaction.

It’s rather “pop psychology”-ish, but it’s very enabling in terms of helping me think about art creation in a wholesome way, in a way that is opposite to that image of the tortured artist celebrated by the media. Van Gogh, Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath – the list goes on.

But surely there’s also room for artists/writers who want to be productive and remain sane… there’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, who deliberately moved away from photography to take up painting later in his life, there’s Wallace Stevens, poet and vice-president of an insurance company, who was productive as a poet all the way till his death in his seventies.

I get out of myself and look at other people and think about what it is that occupies them…

This man, for instance, stood just like this for a really long time, looking at a building across the road.

I took some time to frame the scene properly, and turned around later and saw there were bemused people looking at me looking at him…

Everywhere we go, we bring along a baggage of impulses, desires, anxieties, ambitions…

Maybe one day I’ll get caught and someone would tell me to grow up and that this is not a proper use of my time…

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