Photography
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Photowalk: Odd Jobs in Georgetown (Chennai, India!)
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…
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Photowalk: Chintadripet
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…
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Sunday Photowalk through the ‘Hood
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…
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Testing the Kodak Retina 1a
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…
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Diwali Fireworks – 7 Steps to Help Photograph them Effectively (Even if it’s Cheating!)
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…
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Photowalk: Diwali
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…
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Photowalk: Triplicane
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…
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Going to Goa: Rome of the East
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…
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Street Photography: Is Black and White Best?
A few days ago, I came home from work and sat down at the computer to see what folks were up to on Facebook, and I saw the “Photographic Society of Madras” was hosting a talk by an American street photographer, to start in 15 minutes – and it was only a mile away! So…
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Chennai Photowalk Part 3: Kapaleeshwarar Temple
…as far as this particular photowalk goes, I’ve saved the best for last. We initially went into the less-trafficked entrance entrance to this amazing temple, following the lead of the Indians in our group, and after a few photos, were ushered out and told to come in the other entrance. But not before I scored…
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Chennai Photowalk Part 2: Streets at Night
It seems strange to think that, after 2 months living in this city, we haven’t really been out at night. I’ve been out very early and there are a surprising number of people up and about – this is the time when the trucks are unloaded bringing new stock to the shops. But in the…
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Chennai Photowalk: In Search of Golu
Golu, also known as Kolu or Bommai Golu – the “festival of dolls” – has come to Chennai. Golu is celebrated during the festival of Navratri in southern India. I find the background of the festival confusing, not knowing many of the stories relating to Hinduism, but the festival manifests itself in southern India in…
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Found Film: 110 “Pocket Instamatic”
One of those small 110 cartridges people used to put in “pocket instamatic” and other miniature cameras in the 1970s and 1980s came into my possession the other day. All twelve pictures had been taken. No idea whose it was originally – it was probably found in an old camera picked up at a garage…
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Vintage Photos with the Agfa Billy Record I
Here’s another post about vintage cameras from this blog that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Agfa’s Billy Record I was produced from 1950 to 1952 in the U.S. Zone of post-World War II Germany. The export model (to the U.S.) was known as the Ventura 69. It shoots at 3 speeds (1/25, 1/50,…
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Color Film Processing at Home
There are quite a few opinions out there on the ‘net that processing color film yourself is just too darn hard. I’m happy to report that I managed to do it for the first time – and if I can do it, it’s definitely not that hard. You do have to be able to keep…
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Success! Processing B & W Film for the First Time
This weekend, I set out to try and cut the expenses for my hobby a bit by learning to process the film myself. I ordered the chemicals for both black/white and color film processing a few weeks ago, along with a developing tank from the 1950s I picked up on eBay for 3 bucks. The…
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Preparing to Process my Own Film for the First Time
It has been about seven months since I started fooling around with film photography again, after a break of decades. My daughter suggested we try and load up an old folder we had picked up years ago at a flea market in Belgium – I blogged about it back in February. Today, laughing, she said…
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and yet MORE Adventures with Redscale Photography
Yesterday I blogged about redscale photography with 35mm film – i.e. taking a roll of normal film and flipping the film inside the cartridge so that the light passes through the film itself before it hits the emulsion and causes the chemical reactions that produce an image. The same technique can also be applied, of…
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More Adventures with Redscale Photography
What’s redscale photography? I didn’t know either at first – I saw some “redscale film” for sale and started asking about it, and found out that it’s nothing more than ordinary film, but reversed. Photographic film has layers of chemicals in a certain order to produce the best effect, and as light enters the camera…
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The Trouble With Black and White Photography
I enjoy looking at good black and white photographs. But maybe it’s just me – I find it extraordinarily difficult to create good black and white photographs. The problem is, we see in color. And I use color references to help me select and frame photographs before I press the shutter button. Then I get…
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Afghanistan: The Power of Photography
Free and open media are at the heart of maintaining a free and democratic state. This is especially applicable to photojournalism, due to the power of photographs to convey emotion and meaning often eluding other media forms. This was a key component of the thinking that led me, in 2009, to conceive of a photo…
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Matchbox Pinhole Camera II
A couple of days ago I posted about a project where I taught teens in one of Windhoek’s vulnerable communities to make matchbox pinhole cameras. I lamented how few of the photos had turned out because I had failed to actually make one of the cameras myself in order to use my own experience to…
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Matchbox Pinhole Camera Project
One of the last projects I attempted with the teens I worked with during the last two years in Katutura, Namibia was a photography class. The idea was that I would explain how cameras work; bring a half dozen of my vintage cameras for them to examine and touch; explain basic principles of photography, and…
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Redscale Photography – First Attempts
Being new to film photography, I had never heard of “redscale photography” until I spotted this on on Flickr and had to know how he had gotten this effect: Wanting to try it out on my own, I did a bit of research and discovered that the “redscale film” being offered by some vendors is…