TAZM PICTURES

Found Film Friday: Holy Toledo! It’s an Ansco Anscoflex!

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

This week’s Found Film Friday is a fun find…

This week’s film is a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan 620 film. I was the winning bidder on eBay, and asked the seller where the film had come from. He told me he was selling the camera separately, so I bought that as well. It’s an extremely unique camera – an Ansco Anscoflex camera designed by one of the most prolific design houses the United States has seen – Raymond Leowy Associates. This is the company that designed the Coca-Cola bottle. The zippo lighter. Logos for companies like Lucky Strike, Shell Oil, BP, Exxon – the list goes on and on. You can read all about it in this article about the Anscoflex II. This post is about the roll of found film:

…that was found in this camera:

Normally when I develop rolls of found film, I’m lucky to get a tiny clue or two that tells me when, or possibly where, a roll might have been taken. These cameras were manufactured between 1953 and 1956, so we know the photos aren’t older than 1953, but apart from that the photos could have been taken last week!

In this particular roll, nearly all the photos were terribly underexposed – I’d guess the owner was having trouble with the flash – with the exception of a couple of exposures that were extremely clear and sharp. Both were birthday photos, oddly seeming to be the same child taken a few years apart. The first made me think of “The Shining” – I don’t know why:

and the second one had a huge clue – a newspaper!

I struggled for a while with the name of the paper – played around with the contrast, tried to zoom in and out – no luck. So I posted it on Twitter, and within seconds my daughter came in, inexplicably, with the answer: the Toledo Blade!

So then we went looking for copies of front pages, and found a huge archive of jpegs. We discovered that the Toledo Blade changed its masthead to “The Blade” in 1960, thus bracketing our photos between 1953 and 1960. My daughter realized that if we could date the newspaper, we would be able to identify the date of birth (plus or minus a day or two) of the child in the photo celebrating her 6th birthday!

So that’s where the excitement ends for now. We spent a few hours scouring archives, and unfortunately many of the jpegs are missing, so we were unable to identify the paper above. We have sent an email to the Toledo Blade itself, thinking they might want to involve their readers in solving this puzzle, but no answer so far. We also tried the East Toledo Historical Society, who wrote back and said they had no idea. But who knows? Maybe we’ll solve this puzzle yet.

The camera was acquired in an estate sale. The birthday girl would be in her late 60s or early 70s, and it’s possible that the owner of the camera might have been her father. Beyond that it’s all conjecture.

Any ideas? Let us know – we’d love to hear from you!

Posted in Found Film, Vintage cameras | Tagged 1950s, ansco, Anscoflex, birthday, found film, mystery, Toledo, Toledo Blade | 2 Comments

Cross Processing 127 Film

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

When I first started playing around with vintage cameras, I wasn’t sure what kind of film to order, and just for fun, ordered a roll of Rollei Crossbird, without really knowing what it was. It turns out this is slide film – i.e. “positive” or “color reversal” film you would use for old-fashioned slides, rather than “negative” film commonly used in film photography. It’s called “crossbird” because of the popularity of using slide film in “cross processing”. Slide film is commonly processed using the E-6 process, in all its variants; while negative film is processed using the C-41 process. “Cross processing” is taking one type of film and applying the other film process to develop it. This can either involve processing slide film using the C-41 process, or negative film using the E-6 process – with the former being more popular.

Why cross process? Doesn’t this ruin the photos? Well, it seems that cross processing results in unpredictable color shifts that people find pleasing and/or interesting. Nowadays, it seems that the people who continue to insist on using film photography tend to be an experimental bunch – there’s a lot of, “I wonder what would happen if…”

So I put this one roll of 127 film into an old camera – a 1940-ish Agfa A8 Cadet, pictured below:

It’s a tiny little thing, about 2/3 the size (in all dimensions) of the usual box cameras of this era, with an f/11 aperture and a shutter speed of about 1/40 of a second, with a small tab you can pull to keep the shutter open for timed exposures. I walked around Windhoek for an hour or so and only sent the film in eons later.

Out of the eight shots, only one was really any good, in my opinion. I have since tried developing a few rolls of “found” slide film in C-41 chemicals (now that I have figured out how to do this myself) and have come up with zilch.

It turns out that this particular roll may have been one of the last Rollei Crossbird rolls produced – everywhere I look appears to be out of stock, and Rollei itself does not appear to sell the film. But ultimately it’s just slide film – but larger, of course. I have a couple of rolls of 35mm slide film I may try this with in the future as well. But for now, I honestly fail to see what the fuss is all about!

Posted in film processing, Vintage cameras | Tagged A-8, A8, Agfa, cadet, Cross-processing, Crossbird, Rollei | Leave a comment

Photography Tips: Kanchipuram, India – the “City of One Thousand Temples”

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

We recently had the opportunity to visit Kanchipuram, a city about 70 km from Chennai. Nicknamed “The City of Thousand Temples”, the city may well have temples approaching that number – we didn’t count. Many of them are historically and architecturally significant, and the temples have made the city a major pilgrim destination, as it is considered by Hindus of India to be one of India’s seven holiest cities. Specifically, Hindus believe Kanchipuram is one of the seven cities that are providers of “moksha” – or final release.

All of the temples provide excellent photography opportunities. They all close in the middle part of the day – roughly noon to 4 – so we only had the opportunity to visit some of the more well-known and impressive ones, including Sri Ekambareswarar Temple:

Kanchi Kailasanathar Temple:

and Kanchi Kamakshi Amman Temple:

Although they are certainly all unique, there are a number of characteristics that tend to repeat in Indian temples – at least those I have seen in southern India. The challenge in photography then becomes capturing them in a way that is unique or different. It’s like photographing the Eiffel Tower: it’s a complicated and impressive structure, but everyone has seen the typical photo that the vast majority of tourists take of it. Is it possible to document what is unique about a certain temple, or use angles and settings to capture things in a completely different way?

Personally, I don’t have the best eye for new and interesting angles, so I came back from Kanchipuram with a bunch of fairly uninspired and uninteresting photos. In addition, they failed to capture the rich textures, highlights and shadows I remembered vividly from our visit. This is where a little software post-processing can help a little. And you don’t have to go broke doing it. Many purists will insist this is “cheating” – but I believe it’s an inherent part of digital photography.

For one, I have a habit of taking “crooked” pictures. This is a relatively simple problem, but it seems that many people overlook it. Especially in architecture, if you have a lot of parallel and perpendicular lines, it can be distracting if they are slightly off from horizontal or vertical. So I use Photoshop Elements ($80) to “free rotate” the photo so it’s straight, and then crop off the edges to fix all the missing edges from rotation. You can do a quick auto-enhance from there, maybe crop a bit more here and there, and end up with a pretty nice photo. But I also like to use the lighting adjustments to play around with the shadows and contrast, and also maybe increase or reduce the saturation a bit – depending on what looks right for the photo. For instance, I reduced some of the glare (highlight reduction) on the floor of the photo below so the texture is visible, and from there slightly enhanced the natural highlights and shadows that were already there.

I also like to use a program called Photomatix Pro (also about 80 bucks) when the light and dark areas of the photo are all out of whack. I shoot a JPEG and a RAW file for each photo (simultaneously) and then I plug the RAW file into Photomatix and experiment a bit with the settings to see what I can do to lighten areas that are too dark, or vice versa. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. In the pictures below, the original shot had a completely dark archway with the scene in the background slightly blown out. By applying a little bit of HDR effect using Photomatix, it was possible to reduce the extremes a bit, without overly affecting the realism of the scene. Incidentally, this is a digital solution to a problem that rarely comes up in film photography. Just saying.

This technique can be taken to extremes – but then you pretty much acknowledge that you’re no longer trying to portray reality and are using quite a bit of artistic license to emphasize some aspect of the photo. Many people don’t like this, but I say they can use their own cameras to take their own pictures…

In the picture above, I wanted to emphasize the sharp angles and carvings, and make everything nearly grayscale, except for the pink and yellow. This was done using some of the slider tools that become available after the HDR processing in Photomatix is complete, and before you save the photo. Before any of the processing, it was a pretty boring picture – but by playing around with the colors, it was possible to draw the eye to certain aspects of the scene.

Finally, a few words about a new photo editing program I recently started working with – Perfect Photo Suite, also about 80 bucks. I used Perfect Photo Suite to emphasize the wrinkles in the elephant’s skin below, increase a bit of the detail, bring out the contrast, and increase the “blackness” of the blacks in the photo. The good thing about this program – even though you can only do one photo at a time, it saves the cumulative set of effects you apply in your photos, for re-use as a layer or filter for other photos. So if you have many photos with similar subjects, and you want them to all undergo the same treatment, this program works well.

After emphasizing the textures of the elephant’s skin and the doors, I also felt that the elephant’s eye could be emphasized a bit more. When you use the “rule of thirds” with animals, they say it’s good to put the animal’s eye at one of the “thirds” sweet spots. The elephant’s eye was pretty drab in the original photo, so here I went back to photoshop again, used the magic wand to select the colored part of the eye, created a “new layer from copy”, and then manipulated that little bit. If the effect is too extreme, you can make that new layer partially transparent. In this case, I think I overdid it a bit, but you get the idea. The owl photo below, where I emphasized the eyes and beak, worked a bit better.

To see other photos from our visit to Kanchipuram, click here.

Posted in Life in India, Photography, general, Tips and Tricks | Tagged Ekambareswarar, elephant, HDR, India, Kanchi Kailasanathar, Kanchipuram, owl, Perfect Photo 8, Photomatix, photoshop, temples | Leave a comment

Ansco B2 Cadet: Photography with an Old Box Camera

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

Sure, today’s fancy digital cameras have a lot of tricks to ensure your photos turn out picture-perfect. But compared to the simplicity of an old box camera like Ansco’s B2 Cadet, the photos aren’t THAT much better!

Basically a wooden box without any real lens, and a 1/60 second shutter that allows light into a box where it hits a sheet of 120 (B2) film at the back of the box, there’s something to be said for simplicity. The only “extras” are a couple of finders that allow you to hold the camera at waist level (to keep it steady) and look into the glass window to “see” what the camera is seeing.

Here are a few black-and-white shots taken in Namibia’s northern coastal desert, the Skeleton Coast. You can see more photos taken with this camera at this link.

This is an old shipwreck on the beach that the waves are slowly pounding into oblivion

A bit farther north, you can visit this old mining (?) rig that is rusting in the desert

And finally, the iconic Welwitschia plant, a two-leafed oddity that lives to be thousands of years old. Clearly not everyone is as impressed with this plant as I was.

Posted in Vintage cameras | Tagged 120, Agfa, ansco, B2 Cadet, black and white, Namibia, Photography, shipwreck, Skeleton Coast, vintage cameras | Leave a comment

“Found Film Friday”: from Fort Wayne, Indiana

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

This blog bounces around a bit depending on what I’m interested in on a particular day of the week, so maybe I will post “found film” articles on Fridays from now on. There are a few folks out there doing “52 film cameras in 52 weeks”, which could be fun (I’d probably be up to week 15 or 20 by now) and then there are the photowalks, along with other strange things that pop up – but there is only one day that starts with “F” so there is only one chance to be cutely alliterative…so welcome to Found Film Friday.

This film comes by way of eBay, from an estate sale in Fort Wayne, Indiana. According to the seller, the film was found inside a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, a camera manufactured in the 1950s. While it is certainly possible that the film found in the camera was exposed much more recently, the clothing worn in the photos and the amount of fogging suggests that the photos were also taken around that time.

Posted in Found Film | Tagged 620, Brownie Hawkeye, Fort Wayne, found film, Indiana | Leave a comment

Photowalk in Georgetown (Chennai, India): the Flower Market

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

Third in a series of posts about a photowalk taken in northern Chennai, in a section of town called Georgetown.

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that there are people – mainly older women – all over Chennai who make a living by stringing together flowers and selling them for about a dollar for 3-4 feet of jasmine, for example. This week, we got to see where the flowers come from. Well, an intermediate step, anyway. I still want to see the fields where they are grown.

When you enter the street, your feet immediately get wet because there is a 2-inch deep layer of wet much consisting of ground-up plant matter that has built up in the street. But once you get past this, (OK so now my feet are wet, let’s move on) you see vendor after vendor with big burlap sacks filled with flowers. Mainly these are just the blossoms themselves, with an inch or two of stem attached – but there is also the occasional seller of long-stemmed cut flowers. At 6:30 am, most of the vendors still have low-hanging electric lights over the flowers and the effect of the colorful flowers and the lights illuminating them and throwing a glow across faces is magical for photographers.

Floriculture in India is a growing industry. India grows many flowers for internal consumption, but its government has also identified floriculture as an export-oriented “sunrise industry” – suggesting they expect the sector to grow. Depending on the website you consult, it is estimated that India’s current production of loose exceeds 1.6 million loose flowers and 750 million cut flowers! The major importers of these flowers include countries like the United States, Netherlands, and Japan. We hear a lot about India’s IT industry, but there is also a great deal of hope in its flower industry – certainly the numbers of jobs created is likely to be much greater.

For more photos from Georgetown, check out this set on Flickr.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged Chennai, flowers, Georgetown, India, market, photowalk, street photography | Leave a comment

Photowalk in Georgetown (Chennai, India): Poses

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

This is the second in a multi-part series about a recent photowalk in Georgetown, one of the most dense parts of Chennai, and virtually the only area to retain its colonial identifier. In a couple of days I hope to also post about the flower market, and the colorful photography opportunities it offered.

But first a few words about street photography in Chennai. This is a great city for it, because people are so open to being photographed. Unfortunately, that can also be a drawback because sometimes you get “stuck” because everyone wants their picture taken! And there are some who feel that true “street photography” involves catching candid moments, snapshots where the subjects are unaware they are being photographed. But in Chennai, you end up with a lot of posed group photos! Fortunately, we’re not spending money on film these days anymore (most of us, anyway) – but it can slow you down.

This Sunday my photowalk ground to a halt for a good 20 minutes as one group after another insisted I take their picture. Some of the pictures are pretty fun, looking at how people pose for photos. Consider these:

Everyone freezes in place – some with a relaxed smile, but most with a somewhat menacing expression. It’s funny that most adult men don’t smile for the camera.

Even this one is posed. I was walking down the street and this (bicycle) rickshaw operator flagged me down with a big smile. When I went to take the shot, he suddenly became stoic and stared over my right shoulder…

Luckily, I was able to get a few candid shots as well.

These guys saw me fumbling with my camera, but were kind enough to freeze in place for about 30 seconds because they recognized I wanted to capture them as they were:

Finally, there was this man, who appeared completely unaware of his surroundings. I wonder what he was thinking about.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged candid, Chennai, Georgetown, India, photowalk, posed photos, street photography | Leave a comment

Photowalk: Odd Jobs in Georgetown (Chennai, India!)

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

This will be the first in a multi-post series on a Sunday morning photowalk in Georgetown – a part of Chennai, India. This part of the city , just inland from Chennai’s port, includes some of the city’s most crowded areas – notably Parry’s Corner – as well as a flower market with bulk flower sellers.

Today’s post is about some of the difficult jobs people do in Chennai to make a living. There are people in Chennai who daily clean up waste from around rubbish bins, people who crawl into sewers to unblock them, and there are the ever-present street sweepers – virtually all women – who work around the clock to keep dirt and waste off Chennai’s streets. But there are loads of other, less obvious jobs that help keep things running smoothly as well.

Let’s start with these guys. They can be seen going back and forth to the various flower sellers with these things on their heads. Generally, one sees women carrying loads on their heads, but at the flower market, I only saw men with these wide trays, loaded with 60-70 cm tall bags of loose flowers being brought for sale.

Then there are construction workers – both men and women – who carry all sorts of items on their heads – bricks, stones, cement, and in this case, huge buckets of sand. And one rarely sees a construction worker wearing shoes beyond simple sandals – even when they’re using shovels to dig ditches.

There are all kinds of rickshaws – mainly the three-wheel mopeds with a roof and passenger enclosure one sees in large cities all over the world. But there is also the non-motorized kind – with a cargo area in front, or in the rear of the bicycle, or a passenger compartment. The passenger rickshaw bicycles can be seen ferrying people from the bus stops to their homes.

All sorts of agricultural products get bought in bulk and sold in smaller quantities. For example, this family has spread out a giant burlap sack of peanuts, which are now being inspected and weighed on a scale, presumably to be sold in smaller bags.

Then there are these folks selling chikoos. Also known as zapotas. Never heard of them either? How about sapodillas? They are grown in this part of the world in huge quantities, but are actually native to the Americas. The Spanish apparently liked them, and introduced them to the Philippines, and then they spread from there. A bit like a plum.

Then there is this guy, who owns a tea shop. It’s literally a “hole in the wall” – he rolls down the shades and has a cutout spot where he stands to do his work. But it comes with a television (see top right)!

And I posted some time back about the local tradition of eating one’s meal on a section of banana leaf. Those banana leaves have to come from somewhere! This guy receives bulk banana leaves, and tears them into “plate-sized” pieces, discarding the unusable parts.

Finally, what must be one of the most difficult jobs I came across – another “hole in the wall” – i.e. a small room, loaded with coal. I found this guy sitting there, picking up one cantaloupe-sized lump of coal, hammering it into little pieces and then dumping the pieces into a bucket. Presumably the “bulk” coal gets delivered there, and he breaks it down for the retail customer? I’ve included a photo as well as a short video.

I may be completely outside the loop as a cultural outsider – but what struck me about all of these people was the sense that they were comfortable/acceptable with their roles/jobs, and all seemed to be doing their best. Something for us to consider when we feel tempted to complain about our job.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged banana leaf, Chennai, chikoo, coal, Georgetown, photowalk, professions, rickshaw | Leave a comment

Photowalk: Chintadripet

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

Chintadripet is a community contained within a bow of the Cooum (or Kouvam) River in the center of Chennai. Though I have no idea what it means, the community was once called Chinna Thari pettai due to its history as a weaving community, eventually shortened to Chintadripet. Today it is home to “Richie Street”, where Chennai-ites go to buy their electronics; and a wholesale fish market that takes in fresh fish from throughout southern India, and redistributes it to retailers. It’s also within view of the controversial, 6 billion rupee (US $100 million) Tamil Nadu (former) government secretariat, still under construction, abandoned in 2011 when a new political party took charge, and currently envisioned as a hospital / state medical college.

Our trip started a bit rockily – we were a bit late and accepted an inflated cab fare after the cabbie assured us he knew where we needed to go. Once we started on our way, he started asking us to explain our destination (and didn’t speak English). I was pretty sure we were at the right location and told him so, but he insisted on driving on. Finally we connected him to our fellow photographers by phone and he took us back to the same spot. He actually wanted to charge us extra for the additional loop…

It’s an interesting part of town, especially with the fish market. At 6:30, the fish market is already chaotic. We thought about going in, but would have needed waders to keep our feet dry!

Like most other parts of town, the area’s walls are colorful with political advertising, murals, as well as the marks of urban decay, which provides rich subjects for photography.

By 7 am, shopkeepers were preparing to open for business, and women homemakers could be seen everywhere going to do their daily errands and shopping.

In a nearby park, (mostly) men could be seen walking brisk laps, people were doing yoga, and a group of men even put up a badminton net as we were watching. And like everywhere in Chennai, everyone was friendly. Great place for photography!

For more photos from Chintadripet, see this Flickr set.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged Chennai, Chintadripet, India, photowalk, street photography | Leave a comment

Flashback: Vintage Kodak Commercials

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

If you’ve been wallowing in depression over the demise of Kodak, here are a few vintage films to cheer you up.

First, there’s “America is Cameraland” – a 1960 infomercial (yes, they had those even then) that plays up the importance of capturing your lives in video and talks about all the great Kodak video cameras for sale:

And there’s this one, with a catchy jingle – “Kodak for Christmas”:

An advertisement for “dependable Kodak film; the film in the yellow box”. Ain’t life grand?

And finally, because they’re all cool and I couldn’t decide, here’s one where they try and persuade you to take loads and loads of photos of your pets. With helpful advice!

These films, and about a million and a half other clips or movies that are now in the public domain can be viewed or downloaded at archive.org.

Posted in Random Thoughts, Observations and Weird Stuff | Tagged Kodak, public domain, television advertisements, vintage | Leave a comment

Improvising a Lightbox to View Dark Negatives (Found Film)

Posted on November 19, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

This is probably not a problem that comes up too often, But the good news: I have a solution!

What can you do when your negatives are so dark, your scanner can’t “see” any image? This happened to me the other day – I had developed a roll of “found film” and could see there were images on it when I held it up to a bright light. But when I tried to scan it – nothing. No amount of changing scanner settings would make the images I could clearly see on the film visible to the scanner. So I decided to make an improvised light box, using what I had lying around.

This ended up being the empty box for a case of coke (cans), a couple of soft plastic CD covers, a roll of duct tape, some electrician’s tape, and an LED video recording light. First, I used duct tape to make the closed end of the box light-tight. Then – the negatives being 127 format – I measured a square in the center of one end of the box exactly the size of one exposure and cut it out as cleanly as possible. Next, I used electrician’s tape along the edges of that square to make the edges absolutely straight, letting the tape hang just slightly over the opening – because the edge of the film is normally unused. About 1 mm all around will do. This also makes sure no light will leak past the edges of the film later on.

Then I cut a couple of squares out of some plastic (soft) CD covers. Any type of cloudy plastic will do. The point was to diffuse the light that will be coming from the LED through the film so that it’s distributed evenly. I used two pieces because the plastic was nearly transparent, and two were needed to do the trick. Then I duct taped the tops and bottoms of both pieces in such a way that the film would barely fit through sideways. You can see the mess I made in the photo below, where the 127 film can be seen being moved into position for the first frame.

Next, I simply put the box on a coffee table and positioned the video light at one end so that it illuminated the negative (as close as possible without the individual LED lights showing through the film), and at the other end I positioned a camera on a tripod. So this is basically what the camera would “see” from the open end:

Then it’s just a matter of moving the film into each position, zooming in, and snapping a photo. You can crop it later – the main thing is to get close an in focus. So what did the film look like?

I realized that next, I had to convert to black and white (after cropping and straightening). This film was designed for the (now outdated) C-22 process, which is probably why it turned out this way. So then I had a black and white scan, but for some reason still couldn’t make sense of it:

Finally I realized I was looking at a negative. How to convert to a positive image? Fortunately, Photoshop (Elements – and regular Photoshop and Gimp too, I assume) also has a trick for that. Select filter–>adjustments–>invert, and voila, your “positive” image. Fiddling around with contrast and lighting controls will help bring out the image a bit more.

So that’s how you can make and use a simple lightbox using things you probably have lying around somewhere. This could be especially handy if you want to scan slides, or slide film for example, and don’t have a scanner or slide projector. You’ll just have to cut the hole a smaller size.

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at in these photos! What I did get a kick of was that most photos came in twos. Remember back in the days of film cameras, when people always took two pictures of everything, “just in case”? But it turns out that apart from the photo above and one other, the roll was mainly photos of rocks and landscapes. It looks like someone went on a trip somewhere scenic, but I’m not sure where. Do you?

Posted in film processing, Found Film, Tips and Tricks | Tagged C-22, found film, improvised, lightbox, negatives, photoshop, scan, slides | 1 Comment

Sunday Photowalk through the ‘Hood

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

Monsoon season has come to Chennai, India. According to the weather reports, it’s only raining in Chennai. But it seems that all the rain which should have fallen elsewhere is also falling in Chennai. So when I woke up this morning for the planned photowalk in town (with other photographers) and heard the pouring rain, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Hours later, I saw the photos posted by one of the others on that walk and regretted not having gone. So later in the day – when the rain had finally cleared for a bit! – we went on a photowalk of my own through the neighborhood.

Today was one of those days when everyone wanted their picture taken. Walking through a working-class, semi-informal neighborhood, groups of boys were playing marbles at regular intervals and would greet us as we walked past. Spotting the cameras over our shoulders, they would invariably call, “photo! photo!” so that’s mainly the kind of photos we got today.

In the second shot, you can see a bit of the neighborhood. In the background is a man in a red shirt.

So as soon as we left these kids behind, the man in the red shirt wanted us to photograph him and his friends. So I did that.

Not everyone looks happy in the photo, but immediately afterward, every one of them came to shake my hand when I showed them the photo.

We also spotted a few animals on the way. Cats everywhere. And dogs in Chennai generally sleep wherever they happen to be when they’re tired – even on a city street with cars going by. But this little guy squeezed in under the stoop, where he was joined by a chicken:

In another neighborhood, we spotted these goats. Try getting THEM to all look at the camera at the same time…

On the way home, we picked up some flowers from one of the flower sellers. They sit at tables on the sidewalk and string together Jasmine, marigolds, and other flowers. They are measured and sold by the “forearm” – i.e. they hold the string at one end and measure to the elbow. Cost: 20 rupees. About 30 US cents.

And finally, I spotted this lady – taking a break from sweeping. I thought the garage door, along with her, would make an interesting photo. She was tickled to have her photo taken but I think she was a bit surprised when I showed her the result.

And that’s how I spent a good part of my Sunday.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged animals, Chennai, goats, kids, photowalk, portraits | Leave a comment

Found Film: Singing Family

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

Here’s another “found film” set – one of a number of rolls of vintage film that have been discovered inside cameras, attics or elsewhere – that have made their way to me to be rescued from oblivion. This is the latest roll:

This roll supposedly originated in South Carolina, but we have a clue that took me awhile to decode – there’s a college sweatshirt that reads “Kutztown State.” That’s what Kutztown University of Pennsylvania was called between 1960 and 1983. Other than that, I am unable to date or locate the film.

But one thing’s for sure – this family loves to sing! They look like they are having a great time, scaring each other, swimming in a pond, singing after swimming in a pond, running around the woods, and getting really excited about having caught a really small fish!

Posted in Found Film | Tagged found film, Kutztown State, vintage cameras | Leave a comment

Testing the Vest Pocket Kodak Model B

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

I love these little Vest Pocket Kodaks. They are about the size of a Blackberry (twice as thick) folded up. Kodak made these starting in 1912, and continued until 1926. They were revolutionary at the time. As the first camera to use 127 rollfilm, about 4 centimeters long and the thickness of a magic marker, they actually fit in the vest pocket, representing an important step in the miniaturization of cameras from the cumbersome models that had prevailed until then. In 1915, another innovation came to the Vest Pocket Kodak – the autographic feature. Using special film and the metal stylus that came attached to the autographic cameras, the user could open a small window in the back of the camera, note down the date an location of the photo, and by holding it up to the light, create a kind of analog metadata file.

As a result of their portability, large numbers of these cameras were taken to the battlefields of World War I – strictly forbidden at the time – earning them the nickname “Soldier’s Camera”. In addition, George Mallory, who with his climbing partner Andrew Irvine, left their final base camp 1 km from the summit of Mount Everest a full 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, had one of these in his possession at the time. The two didn’t survive their attempt, and Mallory’s body has been recovered, but the camera which may contain evidence that they reached the summit before Hillary is still missing.

The little appendage on the top right of the lens, above, is the finder. The camera is held at waist level, and you look straight down into the finder, which allows you to see where the camera is pointing. This also helps keep the camera stable.

The camera has two settings – “T” and “I”. The “T” setting basically allows you to leave the shutter open as long as you want – you click the little shutter switch to open the shutter, then again to close it. The “I” button opens and closes the shutter quickly. No idea what the shutter speed is – typically the cameras of this time run around 1/40th to 1/60th of a second. The aperture is set with a dial that moves different openings across the front of the shutter – from f/8 all the way to f/64. Using small apertures likely made it possible for most pictures to be in focus – but it’s probably also why you’d need to leave the shutter open for seconds at a time!

So I decided to take this camera for a “spin” last weekend to see how it performed. And to sum up, I was a bit disappointed.

: This is a guy reading the paper outside. Can you tell?

: A young man sits with the usually-ignored “beach dogs”

: Obscured by light, a fellow photog snaps a photo of a child

: Giant chess pieces by the beach.

: Fellow photog chats with a bearded man

: “Laughter Therapy” Group

As is the case in many cameras this old, about half the photos show light streaks, which are evidence of a leak. The bellows in these cameras typically become worn and cracked over time, and tiny pinholes develop in the corners. I had checked this, but after I saw the results of these photos I checked again. This is done by going into a pitch black room and putting a bright flashlight into the camera bellows. Turning the camera in all directions, I finally spotted about 4 miniscule holes. These will need to be repaired before I’ll try this again! This can be done in many cases with a mixture of white glue, a bit of dishwashing soap, and black liquid dye or shoe polish.

For more posts about this innovative camera (100 years ago, anyway!), you can check out the following links:

Cameras Classicas blog post
Japan Camera Hunter
KodaksEfke
Article about the Everest Mystery

Posted in Vintage cameras | Tagged bellows, light leak, Soldiers' Camera, Vest Pocket Kodak, vintage camera | Leave a comment

Testing the Kodak Retina 1a

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

In today’s world of camera that are fully automatic, and only the hard-core photographer bothers to worry about and understand concepts such as aperture and ISO, managing to get decent photos from a camera where you must set everything manually can be fun and rewarding. So I loaded my newly-received Retina with a 36-exposure roll of TX-100 film and set out early on a Saturday morning at Chennai’s Marina Beach.

The Kodak Retina 1a is a 35mm film camera that was manufactured by the German Kodak AG (Stuttgart) in the early 1950s, although there are people who believe it was already on the market in 1949. It’s a pretty sophisticated camera for its time, having sold for the equivalent of about $800 in today’s dollars – and about 140,000 people bought one. It’s fully manual – you have to set the aperture, shutter speed, and after estimating about how far away your subject is, turn the focus ring to the correct distance. The larger the aperture, the more critical it is to get this right, because the “in focus” zone gets progressively smaller.

All of the controls and moving parts are elegantly put together in an attractive package. It has an odd feature I haven’t seen in any other camera; just behind the shutter release (on top of the camera) there is a small silver button which, when pressed, allows you to continue to advance the film without taking a picture. Apparently back in the day it was common to change films in mid-roll, and this was the purpose of the button. According to the manual, you would note which picture you were on, and then wind the film back into the cartridge. Normally, the lever on top lets you advance one frame and then it stops (so you don’t waste film) But with this camera, you can switch to a different roll, and then later re-insert the first roll again, and use the silver button to wind the film back to the point where you left off.

Only I discovered during my test that mine doesn’t work properly. On my camera, what happens is you use the film advance lever to move the film to the next frame, and it gets stuck sticking straight out the right side of the camera. Then, when you look through the finder and press the shutter button, the lever snaps back into place, popping you in the eye! Consequently, I started out with pictures that were either blurry (because I jerked the camera), or pictures that are improperly framed (because I stopped looking through the finder altogether). Finally I figured out that pressing the button would release the lever, and then I could take pictures normally. Until the next frame.

Despite this anomaly, I was very pleased with how well the photos turned out. This is a great addition to my collection.

This one is just a tad dark. This guy makes a living selling the cloth bags he makes with his sewing machine. They’re all originals.

Another way you can make a living is by selling refreshing coconut milk. They will hack off the top with a machete, drop it in a straw and hand it to you while it’s still cool. Doesn’t taste very good, in my opinion – but each to his own.

Cows are, of course, everywhere in Chennai. But it’s rare to capture one this well in focus. And definitely not with a 65-year-old camera!

I always ask moms and dads for permission, and they always say “yes” with a big smile. The problem is when they ask to see the photo I’ve taken, and they stare uncomprehendingly when I tell them it’s a film camera…

I don’t have a lot of experience with portraits, but I like how this one turned out! I’m not sure if there is dust on the camera, or on the lens, or in my developer causing the tiny white spots in the photo.

Finally, one of the shots that came out blurry. This policeman stood so proud and silent until he noticed me taking a photo, it was a shame to delete it. So instead I added some effects to make the blur less obvious.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks, Vintage cameras | Tagged film photography, Marina Beach, Retina 1a, vintage camera | Leave a comment

Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) Focusing Woes

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

The Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) is a cleverly-designed little camera from the late 1940s and early 1950s that fits in your pocket and is easy and fun to use. In fact, after World War II, this German-manufactured camera became a hit with GIs stationed in Germany as it was sold in military PXes.

The camera’s Novar-Anastigmat lens is supposed to be decent, with good resolution, and my 1950-ish model is supposedly one of the earlier coated lenses. I’ve seen others get good results with this camera – sharp, and in focus. Yet mine, for unknown reasons, refuses to turn out anything but blurry photos – almost as if it were a cheap plastic lens.

So I asked around for some advice and had a great suggestion: I could re-calibrate the lens, ensuring it was focused properly at infinity. The technical term for this is lens “collimation” and there are easy guides like this one to help you do it. I decided to use the “cat fur” variant of lens collimation, and one Saturday afternoon, set everything up and got it done. I used a digital camera as the “known good focus” camera , and using two tripods as in the photo below so that I could ensure both photo planes were parallel, quickly got the job done. As you can see on the photo above, there are three screws holding the outer ring with the distance markings to the lens itself – you can easily remove this. With a piece of tape and some cat fur across the film gate of the Ikonta, I was able to then adjust the lens until I could see the fur in sharp focus on the digital camera’s monitor (with the digital camera’s focus set to infinity). I replaced the outer ring, with this position of the lens as “infinity” and put everything back together.

Then it was time to go out and test the camera with real film. I set the camera at 6 feet and had someone stand at 1-foot intervals from 4 to 10 feet. Then I set the camera at 9, 15 and 30 feet and had someone stand at various distances. And still none of the photos are in focus. The “least worst” photo was the one at 4 feet (with the camera focused at 6 feet) – in fact, it seems that the biggest factor in how well the lens focuses is the distance from the camera, regardless if it’s in focus. The aperture was at f/11 the whole time.

Is there a factor I could be overlooking? And secondary to that, this is brand new film which I processed myself – it went onto the spool with no issues, yet the resulting photos are full of scratches (and an occasional bit of fuzz or dog fur, which is explainable). Is there a good explanation for all of the scuffs, scratches and other defects on the negatives, assuming they were handled with care (they were!)

Camera focus set at 6 feet, subject at 4 feet:

Camera set at 6 feet, subject at 5 feet:

Camera set at 6 feet, subject at 6 feet:

Camera set at 6 feet, subject at 8 feet:

Camera set at 6 feet, subject at 10 feet:

Camera at 6 feet, subject at 12 feet:

Camera focused at 15 feet, subject at 15 feet:

Camera set at 30 feet, subject at 15 feet:

Camera set at 30 feet, subject at 30 feet:

Camera at infinity, subject at 50 feet or so:

There are more, but no additional info is offered – they are all blurry!

Posted in Tips and Tricks, Vintage cameras | Tagged 522/24, collimation, focusing, Ikonta 35, Zeiss Ikon | Leave a comment

Found Film: “Backyard Family” and “My Puppy”

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

In a continuing series in which I share photos I get from old rolls of film that turn up out there, whose original owners forgot to ever develop them…

Here are a couple of rolls where I barely got anything whatsoever, but you can still make out just a bit of detail.

The first is a roll of Kodacolor-X on a 620 spool which came from Pittsburgh, PA. Tragically, I made a mistake spooling the film inside the changing bag, and parts of the film were touching each other in the developer chemicals. But through the fog you can still make out the details of a family in their back yard, posing for photos. Lots of “bowl haircuts” make me thing this is from the mid-1970s.

The second roll is a 24-exposure roll of 110 film, Fotomat brand. The film and camera were already pretty cheap to begin with, but time has taken a further toll. Using such a small negative didn’t help things, even when the film was fresh. From the haircuts and clothing, I’d guess this film is from the early 1970s, and someone has a Very Special Dog!

Posted in Found Film | Tagged found film | Leave a comment

Vintage Camera: Kodak Duaflex II

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

One of the key aspects of the vintage cameras I collect is that they should function. This was the case with the Kodak Duaflex II, a plastic (bakelite) camera manufactured from 1950 to 1954. It is normally held at waist level, and you look down into the brilliant glass viewfinder, which shows where the camera is pointing. It was modelled after some of the more expensive cameras of the time, but differed in that what YOU see (via the top lens) is not what the camera sees.

You load this camera with 620 film, which is nothing more than 120 film wound onto a thinner spool (which you have to do in complete darkness). The film sits at the bottom front of the camera, passes along the back where it is parallel to the lens, and is taken up on a spool in the top of the camera. I nearly opened it after 8 exposures – which most vintage cameras take – but realized just in time that this camera takes 12 exposures. Here is a picture of the camera:

I just got my photos back from the lab in Oregon – I had called them in July to divert them to India, but instead they took a long detour to Windhoek, back to Washington, and then here. Always nice to see your vacation photos three months after the vacation! Foreign concept in the days of digital photography.

The landscape of northern Namibia is perfectly suited for black and white photography. With its wide open spaces and tortured acacia trees and rocks, black and white suits the mood perfectly. I’ll just start off with my favorite of the bunch:

We went into an abandoned warehouse in town and had a great time with all the different shades of brown and gray:

And nearby found these apparently unused water towers:

Finally, even this shanty is interesting in grayscale:

To see the rest of the photos, check out the set on Flickr.

Posted in Namibia, Vintage cameras | Tagged black and white, Kodak Duaflex, Namibia, Photography, Tsumeb, vintage camera | Leave a comment

Diwali Fireworks – 7 Steps to Help Photograph them Effectively (Even if it’s Cheating!)

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

Yesterday I posted about scenes from Diwali (Deepawali), the festival of lights, as seen during the day in Chennai, India. The firecrackers that had been steadily and constantly building over the last few days continued to build until Saturday night, when the nature of the sounds changed. Wandering up to our roof, I was amazed to see fireworks in all directions. Periodically the lightshow would be amplified by the staccato rat-tat-tat of chains of firecrackers being set afire in our neighborhood, or the loud BOOM of an individual cherry bomb. I ran down to grab the camera to capture what I could, and over the next hour or so, learned a few lessons about photographing fireworks effectively. A few of the things I learned below.

1. First, use a tripod and a remote. You’re going to do long exposure photography. You don’t want blurry photos.

2. Set all your camera settings to manual. All the fancy automatic settings your camera has are not going to do any good photographing fireworks.

3. It’s tempting to think, as I did, that you should use a high ISO (sensitivity of your sensor) setting. As I was told by some photographer friends the other night, set your ISO to about 100. And you want your iris relatively open – I started at 5.6 but after experimenting a bit, settled around 8 or so. Set your focus to infinity. And if your camera allows you to do this easily, play around with the shutter speed during your photography session, leaving the rest constant.

4. For individual bursts, I tried to zoom in as much as possible. I played around with exposures between 8 and 15 seconds. Some will say use 30 seconds, but I found that not knowing where the next burst would come, setting the shutter to 30 seconds meant I couldn’t react to changes in the fireworks’ direction.

5. Shoot in RAW. Keeping the shutter open for long periods of time will lessen the blacks if city lights are a problem. Shooting in RAW will allow you to adjust the blacks (in Photoshop) and play around with contrast and other settings before you commit to a JPEG.

6. The multiple bursts in the photo above are quite difficult to get naturally. That’s where the cheating comes in. The image above, and those that will follow, are actually “stacks” of images. For these, you want to zoom back out, make sure your tripod is stable and everything is locked down (and the wind is to messing things up for you) and take a series of shots without moving the camera at all. Try and capture fireworks of different colors in different locations. Or just take a bunch of pictures and sort things out later.

7. Now select from 5 to 10 different photos that show different colored bursts in different parts of the sky. Take the RAW versions and adjust them appropriately and put them in a different folder. Now download a program that was created to photograph star trails (I blogged about this before). There are several options, but I used Startrails, which you’ll need to install after you download. Using Startrails, you can “stack” multiple images and get the kinds of images you see below. Good luck!

Posted in Photography, general | Tagged effective, fireworks, night, Photography, stacking | 1 Comment

Photowalk: Diwali

Posted on November 2, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

This morning, we rose early to go on another Chennai photowalk, especially for Diwali. Again the route chosen for the group took us near the Kapaleeshwarar Temple, in Mylapore – which I blogged about a few weeks ago. At this point, many of you will be asking, “What is Diwali?” If you ask the question here, the answer is invariably, “It’s the Festival of Lights!” – which doesn’t get you a whole lot further. But it’s the most significant of Hindu festivals, and occupies a place in Indian society similar to Christmas in Christian countries – this is pretty much THE holiday of the year.

For us foreigners who understand very little of the background, and experience virtually none of the many traditional practices that go on in peoples’ homes, however, the holiday involves mainly nonstop firecrackers, building gradually over the past week, and maintaining a dull roar over the last 24 hours as the skies are continuously lit up with fireworks in all directions. But here is what we were told is the background for Diwali:

Diwali or Deepavali is one of the most important and most celebrated Hindu festivals in India. Diwali or Deepavali festival is also known as the “Festival of Light”. People celebrate by lighting earthen ‘diyas’ (lamps), decorating the houses, setting off firecrackers and inviting near and dear ones to their houses to share in a sumptuous feast.

Significance of lighting a lamp: To Hindus, darkness represents ignorance and light is a metaphor for knowledge. Therefore, lighting a lamp symbolizes the destruction, through knowledge, of all negative forces.

The history of Diwali is replete with legends and these legends tied to the stories of Hindu religious scriptures. The central theme of all legends points to the classic truth of the victory of good over evil. Throughout most of India, the festival is associated with Lord Rama’s victory as the King of Ayodhya after his return to the kingdom from 14 years of exile, together with his wife Sita & brother Laxman after killing the demon, King Ravana.

The Celebration: It is the one time in the whole year that children volunteer to leave their beds long before the day begins. In fact, the traditional oil bath at 3 am is the only chore that stands between them and pre-dawn adventures. They emerge, scrubbed clean to get into their festive attire, and light up little oil lamps, candles and incense sticks. Celebrations always involve the lighting of fireworks and sparklers.

So today was the big day, and this morning we went to the neighborhood surrounding Chennai’s oldest temple to see what was going on. It was a mix of excellent light (rain clouds alternating with early morning sunshine), accented with smoke from chains of exploding firecrackers. And it’s apparently also a tradition to wear new clothes (we were chastised), so you will see in the photos many people either wearing festival attire, or a brand new outfit.

The first few are families lighting firecrackers out on the streets in front of their homes.

The practice not only makes a lot of noise, it leaves behind a lot of little bits of paper!

Other folks were spotted coming or going from temple early this morning. There are several in the area.

Not everyone was lucky enough to enjoy the day off – for some this is an opportunity to make a few last minute sales.

(In India, banana leaves are commonly used in place of plates)

This gentleman is preparing a cool drink of coconut milk.

Mohammed, above, was making his way through the streets when one of my fellow photographers asked if he would pose with the device he was carrying, and he was happy to oblige. This is basically a frame and a bicycle wheel, rigged in such a way that it turns a grinder. This is used to sharpen knives. Mohammed made me promise to deliver him a print and gave me his address.

And for others, Diwali is no reason to break from the daily routine.

My daughter came on her first photowalk today. As the only female photographer in the group, she was able to get a lot of photos that would have been difficult for us men to get. Here she is making friends with a group of flower vendors. The ladies were all smiles and giving her flowers for her hair – but “dad” is all about business and wants a few rupees for the trouble.

Later on, I’ll post about the fireworks.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged Deepawali, Diwali, firecrackers, Kapaleeshwarar, mylapore, photowalk, temple, tradition | 2 Comments

Found Film: Trip to Vegas

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

The latest batch of “found film” comes from Belleville, Illinois. This roll was one of those 126 cartridges they used to put in Kodak Instamatics – in this case a Kodak Instamatic 15F, where the film still resided when I got it:

Judging from the cars in the photos, the film is not all that old, which is why it turned out OK despite being color film (it was a gamble on my part).

But it seems that a retired couple took this camera with them on a trip to Las Vegas. They must have stayed in the Mirage, and snapped a couple of shots from their window, around the 4th floor or so? The second is in black and white as I experimented with Photoshop to see how to get the best detail. The photos all had a blue cast to them – probably the blue dyes degrade the slowest over time.

While they were at the Mirage, they may have met a friend, who posed for this photo the way people this age often do. It’s posing in front of a background and trying to look casual – typically leaning on a railing. You know what I’m talking about.

Here is the traveling couple, posing for a photo in the parking lot. Who’s snapping the pictures? Is it the lady above? Was she traveling with them all along?

I’m guessing they went in the winter, unless the shot below was not taken immediately before the trip. When they got to Vegas it was still cool, which is why he had to wear a sweatshirt. Go Cardinals!

We don’t know if their trip was not very memorable, or maybe they got a new camera, or maybe something else happened in their lives – but for some reason, they never bothered to develop this roll of film. They left the roll in the camera with 3 more photos on the roll.

Posted in Found Film, Vintage cameras | Tagged Belleville, found film, Illinois, Las Vegas, Mirage, retirees, Vegas | Leave a comment

Photowalk: Triplicane

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

After the long series of posts on Goa, we’ve been back home again for a few weeks, and I’ve been able to join another photowalk. This time, it was to the part of Chennai known as “Triplicane”, which is one of the oldest parts of the city. Much of the city that became Madras and is now Chennai was established by the British; however, there were villages here long before the city, and Triplicane shows evidence of being one of the oldest, with a temple that dates to the 8th century.

What does a photowalk “look” like? Basically it’s about a dozen guys with cameras walking down the street snapping photos of nearly everything. I’m not sure why it’s always guys, but it is. Here are some images from the photowalk itself (another participant made the video):

I managed to get a lot of great shots (in my opinion, anyway!) and will share them below in this (rather long) post.

This first photo, the eyes of the two main subjects seem to tell a story that I’m not entirely sure is accurate. Nevertheless, the workers (both men and women) are involved in a construction project wherein the main task of the women is to carry heavy plastic bins full of stones and cement to the worksite. It’s backbreaking work, and note that working barefoot is quite common.

I don’t claim to know what is going on in this photo, other than this is a woman pouring milk over a religious statue while a cow looks on. I have never seen a female Hindu priest, but know that they exist; and offering milk to deities is a common practice. I just thought it interesting with the cow looking on.

Poverty in India continues to be a problem even as the country’s middle class grows. The elderly and disabled are frequent reminders of that poverty. All over Chennai, people have to find a place to sleep – often under “flyovers” (overpasses) but sometimes just on the sidewalks. Disabled people can be seen pushing their spouse around on a low cart from time to time. India is making huge progress, but some are inevitably left behind.

Everywhere we walked, there were men sitting on steps and ledges along the road, which looks generally like this:

It was explained to me that many of the men are day laborers hoping for work. I was told if they don’t work, they don’t eat.

Begging is not nearly as pervasive as one sees in other countries, though there are exceptions:

Walking along the route offered many interesting “street photography” candids of people doing what they do on a typical Saturday morning in Chennai.

I wonder about the young woman below. Women are often seen selling flowers strung into chains, near temples. Is this the life she faces for the next 30-40 years?

The woman below struck me because she was in a packed “diner” but was sitting on the floor having her breakfast, as there were no more chairs.

This woman runs what appeared to be a thriving vegetable stand. She has shaven her head, which can be a ritual for widows, but is also occasionally undertaken for other reasons, as described in this website.

The importance of the bicycle, in all its forms, cannot be underestimated in India. This fellow appears to have just purchased a load of hay from what appeared to be a residential location just behind him.

Bicycles also make a good subject for photography, when they’re just leaning against the wall. Or maybe this is just my Dutch blood. The others in my group were unimpressed. But a bicycle leaning against a wall is a story. How long has it been there? Where has its rider gone?

I spotted this guy on the way home. He had two “bundles” of chickens, one tied to each handlebar, for transport somewhere. I thought they were freshly killed as they were not struggling, and was horrified to see that they were all still alive, looking up at me! Makes you think about eating chicken in a whole new way…

Finally, I’ll leave you with this goat. This pink goat was tied up in front of a shop I didn’t immediately recognize as a meat shop – I just saw a pink goat. Because Diwali season is started, I asked my fellow photographer if there was any meaning associated with the pink goat? His response was, “Nope. It’s just a pink goat.”

To see a few more photos from this photowalk, you can click on this link.

Posted in Life in India, Photowalks | Tagged bicycle, Chennai, people, Photography, photowalk, poverty, street photography, Triplicane | Leave a comment

Going to Goa: Spotted at the Beach

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

During our trip to Goa, we took a trip to Palolem Beach, locally considered the most beautiful beach in Goa, and the setting for the opening scenes of the movie The Bourne Supremacy. Luckily we were there before the tourist season, which means there was space to walk along the beach as vendors worked diligently on their “shacks” along the side in preparation for the arrival of tourists in the coming month or two. But there were constant photo opportunities, some of which I’ll share below.

At the far end of the beach, the shallow slope of the beach means the shoreline moves hundreds of yards as the tide goes in and out. When it recedes, it exposes hordes of crabs that run back and forth sifting the sand and avoiding the sea birds that scoop them up. They would make great models for a Pixar film.

When you got too close to the crabs, they would stop and burrow straight down wherever they were on the beach. This behavior was copied by at least one human.

Farther down, fishermen are cleaning their nets along the beach. We didn’t see any large fish but there were plenty of small ones.

Meanwhile, people continue to work on building the “shacks”. Mainly women. The women below carried container after container of sand from the beach…on their heads.

It was very warm and many people were swimming. Fortunately, there were lifeguards on hand:

I’ll close out with this group of guys, who were standing very passively while their friend was snapping pictures of them on his tablet. Until they spotted me behind him, taking pictures of him taking pictures. Then they suddenly got very animated.

Posted in Life in India | Tagged crabs, Goa, India, Palolem Beach | 2 Comments

Going to Goa: Rome of the East

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

When I asked some photographer friends what I should look to photograph in my (then-) upcoming trip to Goa, I was told, “Churches! Goa is the ‘Rome of the East'”. I did some digging around and discovered that in fact “Old Goa” with its many churches is a UNESCO World Heritage site for that very reason. The city was taken by the Portuguese in 1510 and for the next two hundred years became the center of Christianization of the East. The large and impressive churches that were built by various orders to awe the local population into conversion and to impress upon them the superiority of the foreign religions. From a peak of 200,000 in 1543, the population declined to around 1500 by 1775 due to successive plagues – which must have made the locals wonder about the veracity of any claims of religious superiority. Goa was incorporated into the rest of India in 1961, but Christianity remains the majority religion in the region even today.

When you drive around Old Goa, you can tell the place served as a religious center for the region, because there are places where grand churches literally stand one next to the other, in a quantity the local population never could have supported financially – meaning they had to be paid for from elsewhere – in this case, Europe. The majority of them are painted white, which became so identified with churches, that at one time it was forbidden to paint local houses in that color. However, the Church of Bom Jesus stands out for having been constructed from the porous red stone found locally. Below are some of the photos I managed to take during our short visit to Old Goa.

Shot from the outside and inside of the Basilica de Bom Jesus:

Barefoot men sit in front of the Bom Jesus, taking a break from renovation work.

and a shot of the interior courtyard – which is painted white. In order to make all parts of the photo visible, rather than having, for example, the archway be completely black with the background too light, I used a program called Photomatix Pro, which can be used to achieve HDR effects using RAW format photos.

This is the Se Cathedral, literally across the street:

and a slightly different shot of the same:

Next to the Se Cathedral, you will find the Church of St Francis of Assisi, and next to that, the Chapel of St. Catherine.

Finally, about half a mile away, you can find the ruins of St. Augustine Cathedral. There are much more impressive photos of it to be found elsewhere on the internet, but when we visited the areas was completely fenced off. Presumably there are times you can go inside with supervision?

Posted in Life in India, Photography, general | Tagged Basilica de Bom Jesus, churches, Goa, Photography, Rome of the East | Leave a comment

Going to Goa: Sights on the Streets

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Tom (Admin)

If you ever find yourself planning a vacation in Goa, it’s pretty easy to hire a local driver to get you around. For foreigners, the temptation is to just rent a car and save money, but hiring a car plus driver is actually pretty inexpensive – plus you get someone who can navigate the traffic and tell you what you’re seeing, and even give you additional suggestions. As far as the traffic goes, Goa is not that crowded, but anyone new to India is unlikely to be familiar with the informal “rules of the road” that govern road traffic in this country.

In our case, we found “Seby” and his little white sedan in a little snack shop. Sebby drove us all over Goa for a few days, and we wouldn’t have seen half the things we did without him. This in spite of the fact that, like many Goans, he had a rice paddy at a critical point in the production cycle. All over the rural parts of the state, we could see people at work on their rice paddies.

Everyone has a small plot of land, but not everyone has a harvester. Families work together to harvest everyone’s rice using a shared harvester.

The harvester separates the rice itself (with the hulls) from the grass/plant it grows on. The people collect the rice on tarps spread out on the ground, let it dry a bit, and then use a woven tool shaped like a dustpan to let the rice fall from above the head. The dry hulls blow away in the wind and the rice falls back to the tarp.

The rice is then packaged into large sacks and stored. Later, the rice gets boiled to fully remove the husks from the rice grain itself. For now, however, the main thing is to get the rice out of the fields and dried. All over the rural areas, we saw tarps spread out on the roads, with entire families on the task of getting the rice out of the paddies.

Seby also took us to an attraction called “Ancestral Goa” (ranked #116 out of 122 attractions in Goa!) which gets points for trying hard and for “kitsch factor.” I did a review on TripAdvisor here if you want to read more.

We had also hoped to see some wildlife in Goa; unfortunately, however, we only saw the small kind. Better luck next time, hopefully!

Posted in Life in India | Tagged frog, Goa, India, rice, water lily | Leave a comment

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