Tag: Chennai
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Testing the Minolta SR-T-101
Awhile back, I posted about the Petri 7S, one of two cameras my mother-in-law had passed along to me. This post is on the other camera, a Minolta SR-T-101. This Minolta is an SLR that first appeared on the market in 1966 and continued to be manufactured until 1975. From this website you can figure…
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Final Chennai Photowalk
I’ve been out of India for over three weeks now, but wanted to finish sharing our experiences of our last few weeks in India before closing out that wonderful chapter in our lives, as documented in the TAZM Pictures blog. We have been doing photowalks for the last couple of years, and would often return to…
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The Chennai Photowalk
One of the best things about Chennai, for us, was the “photowalks.” A photowalk is basically just walking around with a camera and seeing what you can photograph. Often these walks are in groups. I discovered photowalks in Chennai, though they happen all over the world – and there is even such a thing as…
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Found Film: My Very First Camera
What was your first camera? Mine wasn’t the one pictured above, but it was close: A Kodak Instamatic X-15 like the one pictured below. This camera was manufactured between 1970 and 1976. I got mine toward the end of that period, when I would have been 8 or 9 years old. But mine is somewhere in…
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When 2000 Giant Ganesha Idols are Immersed in the Sea
My Indian friends who grew up nearby tell me it wasn’t always like this. They say when they were growing up, during the festival Ganesh Chaturthi, they would have a small clay statue of Lord Ganesha, one of Hinduism’s most important deities, which would be dissolved in a pond or a container of water at…
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Pongal in Chennai / Camera Test
Often I blog about old cameras I’m testing out, often I blog about things we see and experience in India. This post has a little of both! The Ansco Agfa Karomat 36 (known by variants of that name) is an Agfa Karat 36 rebadged for the American market, where it was sold by Ansco from…
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Chennai’s Republic Day Parade
Today was a pretty special day in India – even President Obama agreed, as he spent the better part of the day with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, having been invited as Chief Guest for the annual Republic Day Parade. President Obama is honored to be back in #India to celebrate Republic Day and to begin…
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Chennai by Night: Bhogi
I have some interesting photos and videos to share since I last posted in mid-December – but first, some information on the current happenings in Chennai! It’s Thai Pongal, the four-day harvest festival and one of the most important holidays in Tamil Nadu and for Tamil people in general. The festival actually begins tomorrow. But…
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Camera Test: No. 1A Folding Pocket Kodak, R.R. Lens Type
Remember the No. 1A Folding Pocket Kodak, R.R. Lens Type? With such a distinctive name, who could forget it? Not like the cameras nowadays – all DSC-something-cybersomething-shot-pix – they all blur together. Naming conventions were different in the early 1900s. Over the course of half a century, Kodak only made around 50 cameras with the…
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Camera Test: Ansco Readyflash
The Ansco Readyflash – so named because it’s “ready for flash” (but I don’t have one) via two connectors on the camera – is about as simple a box camera as you could probably come up with. It’s made of sheet metal and plastic, and takes 8 exposures on a roll of 620 film, 6…
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Return to the Dhobi Khana
Don’t like doing laundry? These people earn a living doing laundry the old-fashioned way. At various “dhobi khanas” in India, washing clothes – but more often things like sheets, towels, and occasionally uniforms – is still done by hand at facilities like this one by “dhobis” – who have been doing this for generations. This…
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Photowalk: Gritty Black and White
One of my favorite camera/film combinations is a (relatively) cheap Ricoh Kr-5 Super II – at just over 20 years old, one of my newest cameras – and Tri-X black and white film. Lots of people go for “fine grain” black and white films, but I like the gritty look you get from this particular…
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Day at the Beach
Marina Beach, Chennai, India
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Impressions of Koyambedu
Koyambedu Wholesale Market Complex is one of Asia’s largest perishable goods market complexes. Spread over an area of 295 acres, the complex consists of more than 1,000 wholesale shops and 2,000 retail shops. The market has two blocks for vegetable shops and one each for fruit and flower shops. In Phase II, a textile market, and in Phase III,…
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Photographing Chennai’s Kids
A number of different photographer groups in Chennai regularly organize photowalks – walks through various neighborhoods in Chennai. The potential photographic subjects will vary – sometimes it’s market vendors, or stately old buildings, still life, fishing villages. In certain situations, exercising your abilities as a photographer can be difficult, because – rather than you seeking…
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Kasimedu Fishing Harbor
At the northern end of Chennai’s coast, just north of the Chennai port, where, at any given time, hundreds of trucks stretch in a long line waiting to load or unload goods, is Kasimedu fishing harbor – also known as Royapuram fishing harbor, for the town section nearby. The harbor has a capacity of 575…
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Baby Olive Ridley Sea Turtles
Sea turtles have been on this earth for 110 million years, compared to humans’ 200,000. If my math is correct, relating Earth’s 4.6 billion-year existence to a 24-hour clock would have seen sea turtles arriving at around 11:26 pm…and humans arriving at 11:59 and 56 seconds. Yet we’ve been tremendously successful – there are now…
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Chennai: Textures
I’ve posted before about Chennai’s endless walls and the fact that many of them get postered, painted, repainted and repostered. This creates interesting textures; so much so, that one of my predecessors did an entire photographic exhibition on just that theme – and sold many of his photos to boot! When I heard about that,…
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Chennai: Grit and Grain
In Namibia, photography was all about long lenses, tripods, “the golden hour”, and finding the right guide. Since moving to Chennai, a large city in India, the lenses have gotten much shorter, shooting is sometimes instinctive; and sweeping landscapes have made way for the grit and grime of everyday human life, toil, and aging buildings.…
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“Blessed:” My Entry for the “India Is” Video Contest
All living things love their life, desire pleasure and do not like pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life and to every being, his life is very dear.” – from the Yogashastra (Jain Scripture), from around 500 BC. While on an early morning photowalk at Marina Beach in Chennai, India, I…
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Chennai’s Walls: an Endless Canvas
Chennai is full of walls. Many of them are marked “stick no bills” – and people will generally abide by that request. But the majority end up being political advertising space. The successive layers of paint upon paint, posters upon posters are accepted as a part of the texture of the city, and are rarely…
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Badrian Street and the Flower Market
Badrian Street or “Budirian Street” as it is painted on the street sign, is the site of Chennai’s old wholesale flower market. While technically, the vendors in what is commonly known as “poo-k-kadai,” sell “wholesale”, their typical clients are ladies who buy less than a kilogram of flowers, typically to be woven into garlands using banana…
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Vintage Camera Test: No 2 Hawkeye Model C Anniversary Edition
This week’s vintage camera test is an interesting one (yes, but aren’t they all?), despite its rather long name. Waaaay back in the late 1880s, a small company called the Boston Camera Company introduced a model called the “Hawk-Eye” Detective camera. The Hawk-Eye Detective camera was unique in 1888 because it enclosed all of the…
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At the Fair – Chennai Style
There’s a place in north-central Chennai where they set up the local “fair.” Called the “Island Grounds”, it’s the site of the 40th Tourism and Trade Fair. To be honest, we skipped most of the trade fair itself, but found the traditional rides-and-games-and-unhealthy-food part of the fair to be quite interesting, both from a cultural…