Wednesday, 17 August 2011

Sea, Saws, Swords, Sashimi

Walking around the massive Tsukiji Fish Market in the south-east corner of Tokyo it's hard to believe there's anything at all left in the ocean. Men heave huge frozen tuna onto wooden benches, saw them up, thaw them out and carve them into pieces with swords. Everywhere there are polystyrene boxes spilling over with slippery tentacles and glassy-eyed fish. You need to be alert to avoid being mown down by the small trucks whizzing around the paths, and also be aware that, generally speaking, the fishermen are tired of tourists, so ask permission and don't get in their way - they have swords. At the back of the market there are a couple of alleys of small restaurants where you can eat sashimi and sushi from the morning's catch: reward for resisting the temptation to sink your teeth into one of those succulent fish as you slithered your way through the market.

Monday, 18 January 2010

Phim Khong?

Towards the end of last year I started to miss film. Really miss - like the way I was missing crumpets and other olde Englishe fare. As much as I appreciate everything digital technology offers, I was always a reluctant convert, and of late the feeling of loading a camera with film, the different level of thinking and concentration required, the clunk of the shutter, manually winding the film on, not knowing if you got the shot or not, the anticipation, the excitement of flicking through the photos once they're developed, the different texture of the image, were all things that I wanted to recapture - using film is a completely different process and I enjoy it far more than digital.
I bought a holga over christmas so I could play around with medium format film and a fisheye lens for relative peanuts, and when I got back to hanoi I started looking for some old 35mm cameras to take out on the streets.
Had a trial run with a Nikon F3 about which I'd read only good things on the net....great camera with a great feel and heft to it. A lot of the prints came out weird what with it being a fully manual machine, me not knowing my way around it and having been spoonfed with the automatic settings available on my digital bodies, but with the amount of fun I had with it I didn't really care. The ones that did come out well I'm pretty happy with, and the ones that didn't? There's still something I like about them.
Unfortunately something inside the Nikon is stained, or rotten, which came out on the prints, so I won't be buying it unless that gets fixed, but as of today I own a Zenit 122

Here are some frames from the Nikon test day: