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Places to Shoot in Bangkok Part 11: 'Airlab'

Welcome all Chromacoma brethren, I am looking to try something new this month and going for a 'two for one' kind of deal involving a useful place to know for film photographers (digital too for sure) with good facilities, people and equipment that also happens to be a place you can shoot at (even if the area is small) as there is a studio for rent there too!

Airlab has already been mentioned in this blog and within the main guide article (click the banner at the top of this page) but I thought it might be nice for bit more detail and a dedicated round up this month in the style of 'Chromacoma meets Airlab!', so let's get it started. First up, I think that there might well be a parallel to be drawn between this entry to the guide and the 'Chang Chui' post last year. This place also being the brainchild of a fairly well known chap within photographic/artistic circles (and Thai society circles also) who decided to create and open up his own place as a sort of hangout and cool zone for his artistic vision. Just to be clear, this isn't the same person or in anyway connected to Chang Chui, it's just another, similar example of a Thai artistic type with the vision and resources to make a place like this happen in Bangkok. If you check out their website HERE, I'm pretty sure you will be able to see more details about this individual himself but for the sake of his modesty and protocol, I'm choosing not to name him specifically in this article. Suffice to say, if you choose to visit Airlab, you'll probably meet him yourself and find that he is very cool, laid back and relaxed with a nice, welcoming down to earth sort of vibe.

The location itself isn't exactly one you are likely to accidentally stumble over, even if you live in Bangkok, but the good news is that it really is easy for anyone to get to. So easy in fact that I am not including a map as there is one on their website and I have a very simple way of explaining it to you: Take the BTS skytrain out of Bangkok heading down the main (old) Sukhumvit line towards the East (Bearing etc) and get off at On Nut station. Go down one floor and keep walking in the same direction that the train was heading in before you disembarked. Walk all the way in this direction as far as you can go to the station's end before you go down to street  level. Before you exit down, you should clearly be able to see Sukhumvit Soi 81 and its road sign ahead of you, on the left. Go down the stairs to street level, walk along to this street and turn down it (all on your left hand side), keep walking a little way and turn down the very first soi off of Sukhumvit 81 on the left hand side, follow that around a blind right hand corner and walk for a couple of hundred metres at the most, Airlab will come into view after a couple of minutes walk on the right hand side, it's a compound with a house inside and very clear signage. Trust me, it's very easy indeed and hard to go wrong, just wear a hat for the sun.

So, what did I find there? Well, lots of good stuff really. First up, there's a nice air con cafe with decent Thai food at local prices and proper fresh coffee on offer. So, even if you were to visit with people who might not be as keen on photography as you are such as with a partner or kids in tow, there's a haven for them to occupy for a while in relative comfort. There's also a huge all glass and air con shooting studio for rent plus a nice little leafy lawn area with some cool tiny artsy shops. Cool t shirts and the like were for sale here and there but it didn't come off as tacky, definitely a faint whiff of hipster (maybe that was coming from me)  but overall this is only too much at busy times. Apparently however, such really busy weekends as I had seen before at this venue are not as common now. That said, they do hold events from time to time and these are not only 'Airlab' events per se but also sometimes things done in conjunction with outside companies and brands as crossover into advertising and brand hyping circles so I guess it all depends on what's on. There's a small shop selling very high end and good condition camera gear including lots of Leica and classic Rollei gear, bodies, lenses etc. but it opens towards the later part of the day and not in the morning time. I can't comment on that much more as I have never purchased here and so I'm simply putting it out there.

Meanwhile at the other end of the lawn area there's somewhere to sit in the shade and have your coffee or tea (even a smoking area) and this backs up to a really impressive and fully equipped darkroom facility inside an old (air conditioned) familiar looking metal cube shape. I guess one man's shipping container is another man's darkroom, this is also for rent to those who would like access to it. You'll have to contact them for details re. pricing

I would just like to say that I didn't inform Airlab that I was going to be dropping by and taking photos for inclusion into the guide or recommendations to others, rather preferring instead to just turn up on spec as a random foreigner to see what sort of reaction or welcome I received. I'm not saying that I was trying to be deliberately sneaky or judgemental (I really wasn't) but rather I merely wished to try and see what would happen if you, dear reader, were to do the same and how it would be. I'm delighted to say that people either left me alone (as was the case when I first strolled in around 11am) or they then eventually came up to me and politely spoke in English. This wasn't done to hassle me either, a couple of people were genuinely making sure I was okay and letting me know they would help me if I had any questions, was I looking to buy or develop film? etc. Expanding on that last point, there's film for sale of many different types and they do a whole load of processing here, colour and black and white and even some really long lost ancient wet plate processes which is really cool. Again I won't comment too much on pricing but its reasonably competitive at the time of publishing this post and suffice to say that they accept most kinds of film for processing including even slides (E6) and will do very accurate push and pull processing too. It's not a Mickey Mouse all hipster and no skills outfit, it's a proper lab. There's also an 'express' option for those maybe leaving Thailand soon, scans of a very high quality also available. The guy behind the whole endeavour is certainly deeply into film photography and so you are not just going to be handing your film  over to a random outfit without any interest or skill. They have a lot of processing equipment, chems and machines actually onsite in addition to the fully set up darkroom. It's pretty full on. I deliberately didn't attempt to talk to the owner until the very end and he was very polite and friendly indeed. I am certain that  if you turn up on spec and behave respectfully as you would at anybody's 'open house' kind of business, the people here will be very accommodating indeed. It's open daily from around 10am and goes on till about 7pm ish. You might even bump into a Thai celebrity here and there....

As an aside, there were some lovely quirks that had been really well thought out here and there. One personal favourite example was perhaps in the public toilets extending off from the garden lawn area where I noted that the toilet roll holder was actually an old style Polaroid camera body adapted to this new role (maybe that should be 'roll'? ha!).  If you've ever felt like your photographic skills are slipping and your last roll was about as good as toilet paper, well hey...maybe you're not alone in such an assertion. Another nice touch was that the food menu of simple, classic Thai dishes was a full colour, medium format positive contact sheet showing the dish to be ordered, a simple but very effective idea that really caught my eye.

There's limited parking inside the compound but looks like you would be good to go on a weekday, although the street outside is legal to park on. Motorbikes would have no issues. Honestly though, it's probably easier to just take the BTS there. So, I hope this month's little entry proves useful both in terms of picking up film there, dropping it back off to have it devved or even booking their soft light, glasshouse (thankfully there's air con in there too!) kind of beauty/photo studio as a stunning location that is just crying out for great portraiture to be done there (as the owner has done many times and examples of which can be seen around). You could even then go on to rent their darkroom in which to develop the films that you've just shot in the studio at the same location. That's seriously cool and a fully contained (albeit 'shipping contained') 'one stop shop' option for serious dedicated film photographers in Bangkok. For that alone, and with no affiliation whatsoever, I have deemed it well worth inclusion in the places to shoot series for this month, enjoy.

CCP

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Sticking to a Rigid Plan (Forced Bangkok Adventures with a Nifty Fifty Summicron)

Walking around in public with a Leica M and only a 50mm has never really been quite my cup of tea. For many years now I have seen the M as something that should really be accompanied for public outings with something wider, ideally a 35mm or even a 28mm if you're feeling a bit (Wino)grand.

Last month I took that to quite the extreme in the form of the delicious (if hard to handle) 21mm Super Angulon 3.4. For this month's musings, I would simply like to share what happened last week when , without too much pre-planning, I found myself at a loose end in the city with only an M4, a version 2 Rigid Summicron 50 in silver and a single, solitary roll of Tri X 400. The plan was therefore already constructed for me around such fixed parameters and I issued a challenge to myself to shoot the whole roll  with the much famed 'rigid' as a walk around public lens even though I normally only shoot 35mm or wider on this camera for such contexts. I had to adjust myself to going back and seeing through a Leica M window only looking for the 50mm framelines, sometimes requiring me to step back a bit here and there from my usual up close and personal approach. It would have been an easier exercise by far on my venerable M3 as the .98 finder was made for the 50mm length and it's brighter and easier to focus such a lens through but the best camera is always the one you have with you, right?

So, wander the streets I did, inside, outside and back and forth on an especially hot Bangkok Saturday afternoon, harsh light guaranteed. So, how did the 'Cron handle the job? The later model (V2) rigid is a superb lens to focus with, it is just a nice size and thickness to turn precisely but still in the familiar reduced Leica proportions. I didn't only have to adjust my perception of framelines and width but also had to remind myself that even with Tri X and fast glass, the depth of field with the Rigid 50 would be a bit less that I am used to on a 35mm (and significantly less than the almost insane zero to infinity depths of the SA 21mm!). This took a few minutes to adapt to and I missed a frame or two. Normally when shooting street I have the lens ready to go, stopped down depending on conditions. Having worked without a light meter for a long time now, I have all my tried and tested 'go to' formulas and combos off by heart most of the time. At ISO 400 for Tri X box speed, if it's open Bangkok shade, I'm at f5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/500, cross the road to the other side and back out into open sun and it's f16 at the same shutter speed. Changing aperture rather than speed for most outdoor situations works well for me and keeps the number of things to juggle in my head down to a welcome minimum. Let's face it, running a fully manual rig like an old Leica M on film and shooting unexpected, non-improvised 'as it happens' scenes in public without a light meter is already about as hard as it gets (this side of Joel Meyerowitz having his head under a black cloth behind a tripod mounted large format camera on a Manhattan street!) so I don't alter the speed much until I head indoors, or it's early morning, late afternoon etc. With all that jazz out of the way, I like to be at about a 2 metres focus point as a 'stand by mode' according to the markings on the lens. Speaking of lens markings, the DoF scales on Leitz glass are not only beautiful but also darned useful and accurate, so I bloody well use them.

With most of my Leica glass I find the 2 metre mark (BTW I think in metres so even with my vintage silver, chrome over brass Lenses, I much prefer the later in the series ones that have the dual feet/metres markings as 'feet only' drives me crazy) is usually equivalent to having the focusing tab somewhere around 6 o'clock (ish) straight down as the camera is facing away from you ready to shoot. My general approach is to keep it there and then be scanning for what is happening in front of me whilst always estimating an invisible two meter proximity zone around me. Anything good suddenly come up closer to me more quickly than I had anticipated? No worries, just quickly pull/hook that tab up around to your left and trip that shutter. Something further away looks better? Push it away with the point of your finger around to the right to get nearer to infinity and snap. This is best practised at home with no film in the camera as you walk about and guesstimate how near or far things are away from you. In my humble opinion, in fast situations, this might just be the 'correct' way to shoot a Leica full stop . I only really carefully focus neatly through the finder with the rangefinder patch when I think that I have enough time to do so, and/or it is appropriate to the situation (or won't give the game away for a candid shot). On a 35mm or wider, with a nice 400 speed black and white like Tri X or HP5, you get enough room to be quite loose with this and still get nice focus inside a deeper depth of field. However, despite being more than aware of this, of course on the Rigid 'Cron 50, I got just a little bit less wiggle room and this kept me like a short person at a urinal, on my toes. Even when you get it slightly wrong, remember, sharpness is a bourgeois concept :-) and if it's a nice shot, it'll probably still be a nice shot.

Really delighted with the results, a nice amount of keepers that I am sharing here this month, not exactly prize winning photography or anything but I wanted to share the whole 'this is the best I could do 'off the cuff' in public with a single roll and a lens length I don't often use on this camera' kind of theme really. It honestly feels good to have not curated or debated too much over the shots for this, I'm feeling a bit 'rough and ready' with these this month.  Another great thing about this lens is that, as with a lot of Leitz glass, it's perfectly usable even wide open and that makes for a quite versatile bit of kit not just in terms of focal length and framing but also different lighting conditions of course. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for. Whilst I'll always likely be more of a 35mm lens kind of guy, I can fully see the merits of the old standard 50mm approach that pervaded much of photojournalism until the late 60's and although all the old cliches of 'being so liberating just forcing yourself to stick with only a single 50mm lens' are all floating dangerously close around me as I type this post, I shall resist.I must at least confess to really having enjoyed shooting this roll. I've also owned the first version collapsible 'cron 50mm in the past as well but find the look a little different to this rigid, unless you stop one way down and then most of the Leitz 50 pre-asphs will all look quite similar anyway. One nice little outcome was that I (re)discovered that 50mm's are actually a lot more versatile than I remember them being for the way I personally tend to shoot. I suppose this is good news really because if you want Leitz glass, and you would like to be looking at faster stuff in the realms of 'Cron or even 'Lux, then a fifty is always going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than its equivalent 35mm counterpart in most cases. 

As I type this, I also recall that I must have been feeling quite keen as I even developed the roll within about two hours of shooting its last frame that same day upon returning back to Chroma HQ, and that doesn't happen too often. Below here are the rest of my favourites from the roll, now in the meantime please just go out and shoot some film, see you all again next month.

CCP.

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Hey Babe, Take a Walk on the Wide Side

Full apologies to Mr. Reed for the title but the trite cliche just jumped right out at me. Back to attack in sunny Bangkok once again this month to look at things from a new angle, a very wide angle to be more precise. Despite typically preferring 35mm as a standard lens on a 135 film camera, I don't often find myself tempted to go significantly wider than that. I have however thoroughly explored 28mm from time to time as I liked the added drama this gives and it's not too far of a step away if somebody is already used to seeing the world through 35mm eyes (or Leica goggles for that matter). It was the work of Winogrand that first caught my eye for the 28mm focal length and I enjoyed it in the past shooting film on both Nikons and Leica M's for out and about in the city kind of work (my top choices on black and white film were the AI-s 28mm 2.8 Nikkor and Elmarit 28mm v3 in case anybody's interested). Other than that and a very brief fling with an 18mm 3.5 AI-s Nikkor ten years ago, I haven't ever really had a good long run with any quality glass at the really wide end of things.....but that all seems about to change!

In Leicaland, I have always been very intrigued by the 21mm Super Angulons, namely the f4 but especially the 3.4. Some tatty versions of the former often float about in Bangkok and are not generally too hard to score but I really had serious lust for the 3.4 and to find the right one in great condition isn't as easy as with other classic Leica glass. So, why the 3.4 anyway? Well, after having trawled threads on the more credible sites such as Rangefinderforum that pertain to this classic, it shows what can be done with such glass and my interest was only piqued even further through conversations with other photographers whose work I very much admire (both with and without this lens) when they sang the praises of the 21SA. I was interested to see what could be done on the street with this focal length on a Leica M film body in and around Bangkok on my beloved black and white films of choice.

Regular readers might well know by now that I generally prefer to shoot on film and do so using classic German glass of the 50's and 60's, in fact to me, sixties Leica glass and the way it renders on good quality black and white film is pretty much about as good as it gets. The high res, uber sharp yet low contrast 'National Geographic of the sixties' look just never gets old to me, it's just so classic. Remember, you can also nudge a slider after the fact to bump up as much contrast as you want in Photoshop but there is no 'make it look like the best of the best lenses from Leitz in 1965' slider option in any software that I am aware of. I fully understand why people prefer clinical, sharp looking Leica ASPH glass and why they wanna pay out the big bucks for it but for me I just can't get enough of that old timer, 3D looking glow packed Leitz goodness.  Already owning some of the classics from this era, I felt the 21mm Super Angulon would be an ideal match. As I am always wary of becoming a hoarder, I choose any new item carefully these days. I also force myself to use what I have, which isn't always that hard but I do stick to this quite religiously.  I also seem to be in the minority in that I actually prefer the silver lenses, especially of this time period. There's just something about the satin matt chrome over solid brass stuff that rocks, the very pinnacle of its type and something we'll not be likely to see again anytime soon. Of course, finding one of these lenses then got harder if I was going to score a silver one too.

Fast forward a little ways and I am delighted to say that I recently stumbled upon one in pristine condition, from the 1960's and with a mint condition original silver Leica finder. Trying to eyeball a 21mm without the finder is not recommended. You can get away with it with other focal lengths to an extent (a top tip is that for the Elmarit 28mm, a regular .72 Leica finder window will give you a pretty good built in finder if you just ignore the frameline sets and use the whole of the window when using a 28mm, saving you money and having to use external add ons) but there are no cheap and dirty life hacks laying in wait for the new 21mm user on a Leica M though, you really do need all the framing help you can get here. Oh well, the (pricey)  finder is clean and clear with the original factory silver brightmarks in great shape. Plus, it doesn't rattle its loose elements when shaken next to my ear like so many of the original period metal Leica finders now seem to this long after the fact, which is always a bonus. The good news didn't stop there either as the very specific lens hood (a must for this lens and only shared with one other Leica model I think?) was also available as a set. Due to the huge rear of this beast, it also needs an odd and very deep Leica end cap which is hard to find (can you spot a pattern here?) and this came with a non original but frankly probably shiny brand new better metal aftermarket one which is simply amazing. This particular lens was recently imported from Japan which, as we all know,  is a real haven for Leica vintage gear in top condition. The only bad news was the price, these ain't cheap and everybody knows it, especially the person you might find wishing to sell you a pristine one. I suppose I should at least be grateful that these can't be used on the modern digital full frame Leica M bodies without heavy purple colour fringing ruining the shots (they work ok in black and white modes though I believe) otherwise such prices would no doubt be even higher.

So, there was nothing left for it but to hit the streets with a roll or two and I'm throwing some of these up here with this post and please bear in mind that I haven't had long enough with this puppy to get the hang of it yet, I can already see it's going to take some time. This ain't no 50mm!  Many people (including me) found that going from a 35mm for 28mm for street work was harder to handle due to the amount of extra elements in the frame. Well, suffice to say that if we apply that thinking to 21mm, it's not hard to see why things get a whole lot trickier indeed. Have to say though, it really is great fun, especially in a city like Bangkok. As time goes on, I'll probably check back in with you all on the blog with more 21SA 3.4 shots and musings but just wanted to say that so far I am really enjoying the drama and fun with this lens and it really gives a look that I am fond of. The best way I can describe the shots from it is to say that it looks like a much wider version of the 35mm Summilux pre-asph and if you like that sort of style or the look of the 35mm Summaron 2.8, 50mm Rigid V2 Summicron and 90mm Elmarit V1 lenses, then you'll probably fall in love with the 21SA 3.4. It's very sharp in the centre and I like the fall off to the edges, it renders beautifully with some signs of vignetting at wider apertures but that's just something that I think will only add to the character of the shots on film and hey, it's a 21mm after all. I don't rate lenses by shooting walls and using measuring charts, I like high quality glass with real character and my tastes are purely subjective and might not match what others have to say about a certain lens.  Suffice to say, so far so good and highly recommended!

CCP

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Places to Shoot in Bangkok Part 10: Hit the Parks! (Lumphini)

Ok, so here is a post this month that I have been meaning to get done for ages due to lots of questions from readers about the greener side of Bangkok. So, this one is all about Bangkok’s rare green oasis spots, the antidote to anybody feeling overdosed on the asphalt jungle.

There are several large and very well known parks within the Bangkok city limits, there are also some larger ones that are very famous and treasured by Bangkokians but which are slightly out of the city (the beautiful Phuttamonton park at Salaya being a good example) but for the purposes of this month’s entry I will keep it simple and give some advice regarding the easiest ones to get to by BTS skytrain so that people here on holiday reading this can have an easy time of it too.

The best known are probably the Railway Park AKA ‘Suan Rotfai’, Queen Sirikit Park which borders onto the railway park and Suan Lumphini. The BTS stations for these would be ‘Chatuchak’ for the first two and either ‘Ratchadamri’ or ‘Sala Daeng’ for the latter. I think that the Railway Park might be one of my all time faves but today I will look at Lumphini Park in detail. To be fair though, some of the tips and advice below is applicable to the others.

Lumphini is quite large for a piece of land located in such a downtown part of Bangkok but it’s not overly huge. I’d guess around 150 acres or so. There is a regular flow of joggers and cyclists orbiting around it in daylight and the total track distance is about 2.5 kilometres per loop, if that helps give you some idea. It’s nice to not go when it’s too hot in the early afternoon but there is a lot of shaded tree cover in places to help with that a little. The best times for photographers to visit there are very early morning and just before sunset OR any time during a consistently cloudy and overcast grey day ...although hopefully not actually as it is raining. Unlike the other parks in Bangkok, the joggers and cyclists generally (but not always) seem to orbit the same way and follow the rules. Be aware of the yellow lined track if you are standing with your eye buried into your camera as you could inadvertently turn around into a cyclist going at a rate of knots! Also be advised that some very healthy, large examples of Thailand’s famous water monitor lizards live and thrive in the waters all over this park and although sometimes you won’t see a single one, other times you might see several and quite close to you as well. It’s nice to be prepared with this information as if you are not expecting to see such a beast and then happen to stumble on one unexpectedly, it can be quite the shock (they are the size of an alligator or even longer in some cases and just as ugly and fierce looking). They generally won’t harass humans but give them their space!

This park has more than its fair share of expats as well as locals due to such a location being really hard to find in downtown Bangkok. It’s prized by a lot of hardcore fitness types as well as leisurely strollers. Very early morning visits can lead to you discovering huge groups of elderly Thai Chinese people doing Tai Chi with great synchronicity and people making religious offerings at little shrines and spots around the park.

There is a very low tech but incredibly cheap outdoor weightlifting and bodybuilding place or two hidden around the park that you’ll no doubt stumble over. It’s like something out of a prison yard but has been going for decades and decades (it has moved spot a few times though as I recall). Lots of guys doing dips and chin ups and the like. There is a nice lake in the middle and lots of connected waterways with pedal boats for hire, attracting tourists and locals having fun, making for good people shots.  Refreshments are sold around the outside of the park with some good street food and drinks near some of the main entrances in and out.

Some safety tips and local knowledge that you won’t easily find in all the usual trite guide books:

Although it’s good to come very early for the morning golden hour, be advised that during the night it is not a safe place and full of mentally disturbed people, homeless tramps, drunks and hardcore drug addict types. Be warned that some of them will still be hanging around and maybe only just coming down (or even still high) so don’t be walking around there THAT early. The official opening time is around 4:30am till about 9pm but wait until the sun is up or you might find yourself in the middle of a Michael Jackson video from the 80’s. There are also lots of sex workers in the park at night, often the kinds that can’t or won’t work in the ‘usual’ places for them in Thailand and often for dubious reasons. Don’t get robbed for your camera or wallet.

Another top local tip that catches a lot of people out: If you wanna picnic with your partner under a tree and read a book whilst making some shots and enjoying the day, great. BUT if you are a man alone in Lumphini park on a picnic blanket under a tree in the shade reading a book (especially on a weekend or holiday) then this is locally the equivalent of putting up a huge neon sign that reads “I am looking for a casual sexual hookup with another male’ and you will very likely be approached by people who might misunderstand your intentions. It’s ‘the spot’ apparently and if that is what you want of course, then hey...that’s also cool but I just thought that as one of my readers, you ought to know as I have never seen this written in a guidebook anywhere yet locals and especially long term expats often are aware of it..

Lumphini Park, or often just ‘Suan Lum’ as it’s known to the locals, has been a public park in Bangkok since just after the first world war so we are talking about getting on for nearly a hundred years. The whole of the city has been built around it in the area and so it’s a nice juxtaposition of proper, long standing tropical park and huge metropolis all around. It’s named after a loose transliteration of the reputed birthplace of Buddha himself (although that wasn’t in Thailand of course). There are outdoor music concerts in the cooler months of the year, some of them are quite large and well executed affairs with full orchestras and the like, jazz concerts being another common one.

It’s a great Bangkok park for people watching and photos, enjoy it. This post was a change from the old 6 x 6 Rolleiflex work that has been dominating the blog for the past year and was actually all shot on 35mm Tri X with a Leica M2, a goggled Summaron 35mm and 50mm Summicron (rigid) lenses.

CCP

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Rolleiflex 3.5f: Maybe the Best Camera Ever?

This is no easy claim to make now is it? People are so invested in the ‘best camera’ concept and there are so many cameras out there that could claim the crown. Hassy’s, Leica M’s, FM3A’s,  Linhofs etc.

I have fallen in love with the images from those candidates myself over the years but there’s just something about this choice that I can’t automatically relegate to second place. It is a close fought thing though. I know the M3 would be top of the pile for so many and it might just be for me too although I actually prefer the M2 with a fast 35 and so this would definitely need to be hashed out properly if one were to make an all-time favourite pick. In the meantime, if it had to be just one and only one and you put a gun to my head, you’d still probably have to pull the trigger after you got annoyed at me still not being able to make my bloody mind up, the original solid brass Leica M’s and the 3.5f Rolleiflex take the crown kind of equally.  However, having already written a lot on this site over the last few years about classic Leicas, let’s examine the case for the ‘Flex in a tad more detail shall we?

I, like so many Rolleiflex nutcases, have rotated my way through ownership of many of them  (probably more than I’d like to admit to publicly) over the years  and so I have had ample chance to see the pros and cons of each. I have to say, the 2.8f’s very nearly win out as they are also dear to my heart but in terms of real world use, the images that I get (and handling and carrying around), I just have to give the 3.5f’s the nod. If there are any hardcore devotees of the 2.8f out there that would beg to differ, fear not…I really do understand. Indeed, there are many useless debates in the world of the Rolleiflex user and the top two offenders would have to be those of a ‘Planar vs. Xenotar’ and ‘3.5f vs. 2.8f’ nature. Woe betide anybody daft enough to enter such debates into internet search engines and then try and find the time needed to actually wade through all the info and arguments that will come your way.  Let me save you the trouble:  In  both of the above ‘battles’ , the correct answer is usually somewhere in the ballpark of ‘they are as good as each other, choose the one you prefer’.

So, why do I prefer the 3.5f Planar?  Why is it one of the truly VERY best cameras ever?

Simply put, I find the 3.5 to be more compact, less bulbous, easier to handle and carry, nicer to use, cheaper to buy (and sometimes find accessories for although that one doesn’t always hold up lately) and better proportioned to look at. When I have had both in my rotation (which has happened from time to time), I always felt drawn to the 3.5 when leaving the house and going to grab one. I also like the ever so slightly wider field of view with this model, sure it’s very slight indeed but I find it a useful edge. Again, if all you ever wanted was to do natural light portraits, the (ever so slightly) longer 2.8 lenses and one third of a stop extra speed might serve you well but for me I find that a non-issue really and I do shoot a lot of Rollei portrait stuff that isn’t on this site for various reasons). Also, a Rolleinar close up filter for either camera might make some of that a moot point anyway.

I have found a higher number of my best ever pictures were taken on 3.5f’s, although I am not sure that this data really means much as even assuming that I owned 2.8’s for as long a period of shooting in my life (which might actually be true come to think of it), if I always reached for the 3.5 when going to shoot then my bias got in the way more than anything else I suppose.

One thing that I am certain of however is that the 75mm 3.5 Zeiss Planar 6 element lens is my all-time favourite Rollei lens ever. This is coming from somebody who’s owned most of Leica’s best brass stuff and somebody who likes the look of 50’s and 60’s Germanic, hi-res lenses more than any other. Sorry to fire shots here but these are also the words of a former Hassy owner. Believe me, this lens is where the buck stops. They say that Rolleiflexes can’t change their lenses like a Hassy.  Very true, but if this is the only lens you have on your camera (and you have a hood on it, ha) you will possibly never want to use another one anyway. It is simply THAT good. Surgically sharp, beautiful out of focus areas and a great all round balance and compromise of a design that works well for everything and anything that I personally like shooting.

I think the 3.5f late models really were the Magnum Opus of the Rolleiflex cameras, and by default, the TLR per se. Just handling, holding and operating one is a magical experience. The first time you get to see the negs that were born inside one, you simply will not have the words.

By the time that the factory were putting these together, they had already written the book several times over and really knew what they were doing. The 3.5f marked the last of the 3.5 ‘Automats’ which was a continuous production run of several decades. These are the crème de la crème of the classic Rolleiflexes from an age of workmanship and engineering that are sadly long lost. With the very rare exceptions of the classic all brass Leica M’s and their brass lenses of the same era,  I have never seen or owned anything quite as well thought out, beautifully well-made and so long term solidly reliable as these cameras.  Just a German rock of sheer photographic awesomeness.  The golden period, the heyday, call it what you will but I call it 3.5f.

I recommend a late model but not a whiteface as they are too costly and don’t take photos that are any better at all. I sometimes even think that the whitefaces were perhaps ever so slightly cheaper to produce for the factory at a time when high end TLR’s were becoming a hard sell. The fact that they are newer and made in less numbers is the only thing that makes them now (ironically) more expensive and desirable to collector types. I had a rough one once and I really wouldn’t want to part with the extra money for one again to be honest. As with all Rolleis (of the classic era), condition is more important than individual model differences and with cameras of this age one really should remember that. I recommend finding the number one repair person for Rolleiflex in your country (many countries have one or two and their names are legendary in such circles and so easy to find on the net) and having it serviced immediately after purchase unless you know 100% for sure that it is in perfect working order (for example maybe you are buying from a friend or trusted camera dealing expert). My point is perhaps that all things being equal, and given the choice between two freshly serviced and guaranteed 100% working cameras, a 2.8f and a 3.5f, I would go for the latter. Of course, in real life, that situation doesn’t always present itself to us. Even if it happened like that, it would also have to line up with the right time for our bank balance as well of course.

After several months of nothing but Rolleiflex shots on the blog, I thought I would turn the tables and actually show you some shots of the cameras themselves, all of these have belonged or do still belong to myself in recent times. After the odd dog and bad luck crap shoot, I have also been lucky enough to own one or two of the very highest grade ones both cosmetically and mechanically in the past. I have been paring down and finding a nicer example here and there to replace tattier ones. If any readers wish to do a deep dive on this subject, I highly recommend starting with John Phillip’s impressive and highly obsessive guide to Rolleiflexes (which is THE book by the way, the Rolleiflex bible and the only book you should consider against ALL other Rolleiflex publications out there) and then take things from there.

Anyway, sorry to sound like a collector again, I’m actually not. I strongly dislike it when I start to amass too much stuff. I normally do best with just one or two of my favourite cameras and a fridge full of film. That’s about where I am at with my photography at the moment, I simply cannot recommend a Rolleiflex highly enough to you…please get one, and just shoot with it often. You will be so happy you did. In the meantime here are some shots of mine, past and present, to tide you over.

CCP.

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Working on 'Unseeing Thailand'

Not too long ago, I decided to act upon a long held desire to volunteer my time to some good cause in the society in which I choose to live. Maybe I wanted to pretend that I was a good person for a while. It's not kindness if you expect something in return but I wasn't sure if deep down inside I didn't really have some ulterior motive concerned with offsetting past sins and resurrecting a healthy balance in the black with the bank of karma that some feel governs us all. My cynicism in life is often self-directed. Still, I had found myself in the fortunate circumstance of having a free year and I wanted to make sure that it wasn't entirely wasted. Contact was made and meetings arranged and before I really had had much of a chance to fully absorb the gravity of the situation, there I was teaching blind Thai children a few times a week. 

I had often thought it would be good to try and work in the special needs area of education and although I knew it would be difficult, I didn't really know much more than that. It proved to be a steep learning curve. The thing that hit me the most every time I was there was perhaps just how hidden in plain sight of the public the whole thing was. Located in the heart of a huge metropolis, the goings on should have been a common enough sight to the rest of society and yet most of them presumably had just as little idea as I had about what life was like inside such a place catering exclusively to blind and visually impaired children.

The role facilitated  a situation in which anyone would find themselves emotionally affected and often it's hard to prepare for this, the only way is to just do it and dive right into the deep end. The insides of the school itself were depressing from the outset. The large expanses of gates and wire mesh surrounds seem like something from a Soviet Gulag until you realise that they are there to prevent the kids from falling into or off things. I'll never forget the first time the bell rang and I saw fifty to sixty blind kids on the top floor sprint towards the steep concrete staircase, racing to establish a pecking order for the three storey descent. Amazingly they all knew exactly how far away it was and exactly where to stand and nobody tripped or tumbled down it, my heart was in my throat for a while. The walls were grey and equally prison blockesque. The floors had lines of bright paint in different colours to aid those students who are not completely blind in navigating their way around the school. To me, they looked like they were painted by some communist regime to force everyone into remembering how happy they ought to feel.  The classrooms had little or no decoration on the walls as personalising the learning environment in such a way hardly seems appropriate given the circumstance. Wall mounted moribund TV's hang from old brackets on the wall, the kids don't even know they are there and their power cords dangle away unplugged as a perfect sad metaphor. In short, very depressing.

Truth is, after a while I realised that these kids were just like any others. They were often very happy and had fun at school and most of the sadness was just me projecting my own feelings and initial culture shock onto the situation. Given time, it became much more normal and I gained a valuable insight into their lives and unfortunate happenstance.

After one term of thinking how great it would be to be able to take pictures and document this experience and the lives of these kids, I finally plucked up the courage to ask if I could shoot there and was delighted when the teacher got back to me with a green light on behalf of the school and students concerned and releases were fine.  It is an oft heard ideal in photojournalism that one should not affect or in any way impact upon the subject and just report and collect what is there to be seen as though invisible. Although a nice idea, I have always found this somewhat paradoxical as surely by your very presence in a situation, one can't help but alter it. It's akin to walking through a field of freshly fallen snow and then turning around and pretending not see your own footprints. This situation was truly unique in that regard however. The students I worked with were fully aware who I was and we had started to build good relationships. They knew what I was doing in general and I told them myself to make it all clear. That said, because of their blindness, they typically didn't know exactly when I was or wasn't shooting as I had opted for a very quiet camera set up so as to not disturb anyone. Initially I wrestled with the ethical side of the situation a few times, it felt uncomfortable at first but it wasn't the reason that I had initially gone there and I had been given full permission to shoot and had already started to form good bonds with the subjects. I was keen to portray them without taking any of their dignity and I had to abandon several of my own pre-determined misconceptions along the way. They weren't just 'blind kids', they were kids I knew and I worked with them daily at school.  I was the only Westerner available to volunteer for the school during this period which made me something of an odd one out. The other teachers around the school gradually went from looking at me with some suspicion to smiling at me as the volunteer guy who always has a camera with him. I didn't realise it at the time but looking back through some of the shots now, it seems to be as though I truly were the invisible man and my presence didn't cause any change in the subjects or their actions. I moved to keep out of their way and I felt them flowing around me as I shot, an outsider hidden within and no one else around on my side of the equation.  I perhaps felt like a thespian on stage who turns to deliver his soliloquy to an audience only to find that there’s nobody in the theatre. Walking through the snow with no footprints indeed, surreal.

I took a camera with me every day I worked there and the focus (no pun intended) was on my role working with the children as a priority over anything else, the shots were simply taken as a by product of that and only when the moments presented themselves rather than me going out and hunting. However, if I saw something interesting, I sometimes followed along and went with the flow.  I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and so opted for a single camera and lens set up. However, even arriving at that decision was something of a challenge in and of itself. I had three systems to choose from, namely a rangefinder rig, SLR's or TLR's in medium format.  Too many equipment choices in photography is often a bad thing, paralysis by analysis at a time when you should just be taking pictures. If I don't make a concerted effort to call it and get on with my work early on, the tyranny of choice pervades. Finally I opted to shoot the series on a Leica M6 classic with a Leitz 35mm Summilux pre-asph, circa the early eighties. It wasn't necessarily as though I was looking to snob out on gear but there are a few good reasons why this kind of kit was considered de rigueur for discreet reportage for so long. I found that I needed something very quiet and compact and also using scale focusing before each shot enabled me to just quickly raise the camera to my eye for rapid composition, with everything in focus as I made frames on the fly. I think this is where a rangefinder shines, perhaps its raison d'etre.  It was also very dark in some places around the school and the bright Leica viewfinder window proved good for this. The fast film and wide lens gave me lots of depth of field and I was more concerned with capturing real feeling and emotion from this world I found myself in than I was about perfect focus in the final prints. Leica M's are great when set up and used in such a fashion, really in their element. It's true that I could have used an old Canon rangefinder or maybe a cheaper Voigtlander body with the same legacy Leitz glass for basically the same results but there is a certain gestalt to an M that is hard to relinquish for this sort of work once you have tried it. The slight heft, the way the whole chunk of the thing feels in your hand, some kind of sheer Germanic preeminence which lives up to the hype annoyingly well.

My film choice was a rare departure from my usual Tri-X fare and here I opted to shoot the project on Ilford Delta 400 for the whole year. Just fancied a change and I like to support Ilford a bit here and there whenever I can. I bought in bulk early on to ensure I wasn't running out of the chosen stock halfway through a project. My freezer was nicely stocked at home. I don't know why but I have a real issue with shooting different films within the same series. I decided against any pushing and opted to shoot it at box speed of 400 iso. I developed it all in my dev room at home in Ilfotec HC (dilution B) and also used their stop and rapid fix with some Kodak Photo Flo for good measure. Dev times were around six and a half minutes at 20 degrees C.

There are still quite a few places that will soup your black and white films around in Thailand but I am a firm believer in devving your own, especially for black and white. The way I see it, if I hand over my B +W to a lab only one of two things are going to happen: 1) They get it wrong and mess it up in which case I kick myself as I know that my system and experience would have got it right, or: 2) They get it looking beautiful but you personally never really get to find out exactly how they achieved that and what chemicals and times were used and so you can never replicate that yourself nor can you guarantee that they can get it exactly the same if you come back to them again. Neither situation works for me, hence, I do it myself and keep very exacting records of every last factor so that I always know I can get the results the way I want them to look. No sense in being lazy plus I actually find it almost a pleasing and relaxing little discipline at times. If you've never learnt how to dev black and white film but like the idea of shooting it, I highly recommend taking the time to learn. It's not that hard and the initial outlay is far from expensive. The chemicals last for a ridiculously long time and suddenly this kind of film photography becomes a whole lot cheaper and you are no longer relying on other people, which is always good in life. There's also something special about being involved in the back end of the process and not just the shooting, you become more well rounded in your work and gain greater insight into what is going right or wrong with your technique. There are countless pages and video tutorials devoted to this subject all over the web so I shan't add one here. Suffice to say there's nothing like pulling out a reel of well shot and devved negs from a tank and seeing them for the first time as you hang them up to dry.

Shortly after the series was done, I was delighted and honoured to have my work accepted for a small exhibition at 'Photogallery' in Silom, Bangkok.  The work was shown during March 2015 and I received some nice feedback and emails about it.  I learned a lot throughout the experience and it was nice to have done it, I wouldn't rule out maybe helping again one day if circumstances permit.

CCP

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Working on 'Bangkok Dawan Dok'

Arthur Daley the sports writer once quipped that ‘Golf is like a love affair. If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.’ He might just as well have been talking about shooting street photography. I feel it’s probably the hardest photographic genre; you are essentially dealing in ninety something percent failure. Like a gold rush prospector panning your way through the dirt and hoping for an occasional nugget of visual gold. For added masochism, simply do it all on a film camera and home develop a roll every 36 frames. Rinse and repeat, quite literally.

 My thinking behind this project was to try and portray a very real and honest view of a mundane, humdrum Bangkok suburb. I really didn’t want to take pictures of temples, tuk-tuks, brightly robed Buddhist monks and all the other trite clichés that often seem to pervade such work. I didn’t even want to shoot anywhere that you might easily see Westerners walking around in tourist mode. In fact, and just as pertinent, I sure as hell didn’t want frames that looked like they were made by a random white man wandering the back alleys of Bangkok drinking shots of rice whiskey with complete strangers just to get a few shots in.  

 I had been going through a stage of looking back over my collection of Winogrand photos (again) and appreciating the added drama that a 28mm lens can bring to the table when compared to the usual 35 or 50mm lenses that are often considered the preserve of such work. I only found out last year that all his great shots were actually on a 28mm. I had been a massive fan of the man’s work for a long time but only later discovered that in addition to his immense skill, experience and prolific output, the drama in his work also perhaps owes something to this preferred wider focal length. I decided that I would like to shoot some street work with a wider lens than normal and 28mm was definitely the ticket. I had never owned a prime lens in this length and was surprised at how little I knew about them in terms of models, even in systems that I have had a lot of experience with, such as Leica M mount or Nikon F. I could tell you all about the nuances of different 35mm’s from several manufacturers in my sleep, like any true anorak, but this was new ground. I spent a while doing some homework on the issue and then got distracted as I often do, letting it slip from memory in due course. Then one day, I stumbled over a mint condition Nikkor 28mm f2 Ais at a fair price and I snapped it up.

 I normally know everything about lenses before I buy them due to losing whole chunks of my time on earth geeking out doing my research. You’ll notice that I use the word ‘research’ as a pronoun for wasting time stuck in vicious ADD circles debating things that I know full well I’ll probably purchase anyway. Yet this was a rare impulse buy of glass for me. I was of course pleased to later learn that this lens indeed has a truly stellar reputation, five star legacy glass in fact, and its great depth of field (and the nice markings to measure it with on Ais glass) was just begging me to put it to use in public. The only curveball at this point was that I although I learnt photography on Nikon SLR’s, I learnt how to shoot what I might refer to as ‘deep in the street’ work on rangefinders and had never really shot much street styled work with SLR’s before. I decided that I would be up for the challenge, if only just because of this new lens. Around this time I stumbled upon some truly great street work by an eccentric but excellent American photographer called John Free (Google him). I saw what he has been doing with small Nikon film SLR’s in the world of street photography for decades and I decided that I wasn’t going to have a problem, and one really doesn’t need a rangefinder for shooting street well despite what the internet says…. but I saw that I might have needed to adjust my thinking. Truth is that whilst Nikon lenses are large in comparison to their rangefinder equivalents, when attached to FM/FE semi pro Nikon bodies, the complete package is nearly as compact as a hooded lens set up on any Leica M. It’s still just about as discreet and eminently useable in such a role.

 So with a Nikon FE2 and the venerable 28 f2, the project began. I shot it over a couple of months on Kodak’s legendary Tri X 400 and souped it all with Ilfotec HC (dilution B) at around 7 mins/20 deg c. Lab scans were later performed on a trusty old Fuji Frontier. I shot  the project in manual mode and went for feeling and emotion and forced myself away from being too obsessed with the more technical aspects of photography just for the sake of it. I did however apply some of my existing technique from rangefinder street shooting such as scale focusing the lens and being prepared to shoot quickly. I found that the shutter speeds you can hand hold an SLR to in lower light are a little less due to the flapping mirror box but in the style of work that was looking to achieve here, it mattered a lot less than I thought. I think a bigger deal is made of this than there needs to be. One issue that I did notice though was that a Nikon FE2 (or FM I would imagine) was quite a bit louder when it went off than that of a Leica M with it’s rubbery curtain swiping away. In practice though, this also mattered a bit less than I thought as by the time it gives you away, you have hopefully already got the shot anyway. Of course, the Leica would still have you covered to take a few follow up shots in stealth mode before the cat were out the bag, to use an archaic and rather cruel sounding metaphor. Also I realized that the ‘being able to see outside of the frame for what might be coming into it’ advantage that I thought I had previously wielded with a rangefinder was also overrated. I had overlooked the fact that using a 35mm lens on a .72 finder in a Leica had pushed the framelines so far to the edges that I hadn’t been seeing much outside of the frame anyway, looking ‘down the tunnel’ in an SLR shooting street was actually no problem at all.

 So, I found a plain, boring, normal and very Thai neighbourhood in Bangkok and just shot a lot of rolls with one camera and lens in a very simple fashion over a couple of months. I found it quite different to be making shots that I consider interesting out of what Thai people would consider very mundane. A good approach seems to be not shooting much until your initial presence in an area has been noted and discussed by the locals a bit. Then after ten minutes or more, when the novelty of the foreigner in their vicinity starts to feign and you are perceived as less of a threat, you can get some shots that look less like you were a part of the equation. I soon felt like I was getting into my stride with the new set up. I felt that the project was successful and in keeping with my initial intentions. I also found that the 28mm wasn’t just good for squeezing more into a frame but it also did indeed exaggerate in such a way that can add a nice touch of drama. If you are already a 35mm shooter, it’s not that big a step to take but I imagine it would be harder for a normal 50mm kind of person to get used to. The lens is definitely a keeper for me. I really enjoyed the putting together of this body of work but it remains as hard as ever to find those elusive nuggets of gold out there. Sometimes that’s the way I like it, other times it drives me insane.

 Still, the definition of anything good is always that it’s hard work to achieve it and there’s something to be said for the pursuit itself. Street photography can be addictive as there’s nothing quite like it when you make a frame that comes out well. Often it seems the stuff that you were sure you got, you didn’t and the stuff that you didn’t even know you got, is great. The trick might be to try and find a happy medium between the two but it is just so hard to do. I found that, like the man said, if you take this affair seriously, it could break your heart… but hopefully not enough to stop you from trying again.

 CCP

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The Ultimate Photographer's guide to Bangkok, Thailand: Film and Digital (2016-18)

HEAVILY UPDATED FOR 2017 AND STILL GOING STRONG FOR 2018: NEW UPDATES AND INFORMATION ARE ADDED TO THE VERY BOTTOM OF THIS ARTICLE

Following a surprisingly large influx of requests from readers of this blog for specific tips and advice about coming to Bangkok and greater Thailand for taking pictures, I looked around for such an article.  I couldn’t find a great deal of information on the net that was comprehensive, up to date, relevant to film and digital photographers and written accurately by people with enough appropriate experience to satisfy my requirements. This (lack of) discovery was equally surprising and leads to my decision to tackle the issue here myself, hopefully I have not bitten off more sticky rice and mango than I can chew. I shall avoid the off-topic aspects (well covered all over the web) such as accommodation, eating spicy food and where to exchange your traveller’s cheques. That said, there might be some key points where photographic and general interests overlap and these may warrant some brief mention, I’ll try and keep it on track.

General:

The light in Thailand is, in a word, strong. It sounds obvious but it really needs to be accounted for, you can easily get sunburnt on an overcast day walking around in Thailand, distracted by its offerings. For film users, this means that lower speed films of 100 or 200 ISO are more than adequate, 400 would be the limit that I would shoot with in the daytime and that would mandate stopping down significantly and ND filters come in handy for those preferring to be wider open for subject isolation purposes. All digital brethren need not worry about such issues of course. The quality of the light itself is absolutely amazing, especially during those golden hour times just after sunrise and immediately running up to sunset. At such times on a good day, the tropical South East Asian light has an ethereal quality and colour palette which is something often previously unknown to those coming from cooler climes, especially Europeans and the average septentrional North American. During the months in which monsoons and heavy rains pervade, namely June through to December in a typical year, it has been my observation that these golden hours have the potential to be at their most impressive. This is when the lighting in which one can find oneself is akin to dreamlike flashback scenes in films or long lost memories of experiencing mind-altering substances in your youth, to those of such proclivity. In general, the intensity of the light in the daytime is such that when shooting out in the open, I highly advocate the use of lens hoods and a filter of your choice. That said, even in such strong, unflattering overhead light at midday, the labyrinthine layout of this sprawling asphalt jungle still offers up significant shaded area and much opportunity for shadow play. Surprisingly, Bangkok can be as much a black and white shooter’s paradise as a prized locale for the colour adherent. A film shooter coming here for a holiday would do well to have at least some of both.

 Places to shoot and related issues:

If you’re here on holiday from another part of the world, I honestly think that almost anywhere in Thailand is nice to shoot. However in the interests of being as helpful and specific as possible, I will try and narrow it down to a selection of suggested ideas. Bangkok is an odd city in that it has no centre per se. If you like urban photography or candid street style shooting, in Bangkok you could try the following: Siam Square (where the kids go to look cool and be seen on the weekends), Chinatown and the sometimes seedy lower Sukhumvit areas. The former is great for a certain kind of classical Asian street work, immigrant ethnic Chinese motifs, old shop fronts and buildings that haven’t changed much in decades. Smoke and steam pour out from small food vendor’s stalls in tight alleyways with great colours abound. The latter offers snapshot opportunities of a broad mix of tourists and seedy types as well as some big city themed shooting. After dark in this area gives you a host of Thai, Arabic and Western fusion with random smiley young prostitutes and ladyboy street hustlers abound. Fast film night work on street level here can be fantastic. Busier office worker parts of town also make for fertile hunting ground on weekdays around peak times and lunch hours when the other areas might be quieter, try Sathorn, Silom or Ploenchit for smartly dressed folk hustling and bustling.  These are places where wide-angle lenses of a 24-35mm work well in my opinion. You might well find yourself in tightly squeezed and cramp spaces yet with lots of subjects and quirky elements that you feel you don’t wish to omit from the picture. Leaving a day or a half day for the main Chao Praya river express boat can be a great idea for a shoot and better than getting ripped off for a private wooden longtailed boat ride. Although to be fair, they are also great fun as you can ask the boat owner to go and stop wherever you like within reason, making for some wonderful ‘small river and its local community’ social documentary photo opportunities rather than the standard Lonely Planet cliché shots. Get the regular, larger and reasonably priced tourist boats every 30 minutes for just 150 baht atSathorn Pier, it even connects directly with the skytrain at Saphan Taksin station.

In addition to planning to shoot at various places around the city, don’t underestimate the Helmut Newton approach to choosing location on foreign shoots. His style was borne out of sheer laziness and he shot much of his best work within the hotel grounds or within one kilometer from it. I am not suggesting this be your approach but in Thai streets, you are likely to find your best shot anywhere, even very close to where you are so be ready with the camera set up for action as soon as you head out. You could easily see a small elephant, a street beggar shouting at two-post coital stray dogs with their genitals locked together and a family of four all on one motorbike transporting a desk fan and ironing board the wrong way down a one way street without a helmet between them anywhere at any time. And yes, they will be the ones giving YOU an odd look. For this reason, if your camera allows manual focusing I highly recommend zone focusing your lenses in advance and stopping down at a reasonable ISO so that you can quickly estimate your subject distance on the fly, compose and take shots very quickly. This goes for digital and film shooters. Practice a bit before your trip to get the hang of the depth of field. If you are an auto focus kind of person, you can take your chances. Don’t buy a new camera for your Bangkok adventure, it’s a bad idea photographically speaking anyway, come equipped with some kind of old faithful that you are already at ease with and know well, be it digital or film.

Don’t forget the wildcard option of getting a taxi and roaming around with a wider focus before simply asking to stop and getting out anywhere that looks interesting to you, even if it is considered plain by the locals. This is honestly not a bad idea. Bangkok is largely a pretty safe city and in broad daylight, assuming you are not behaving obnoxiously, offensively and you use your common sense, it’s perfectly ok to wander. Look around back streets and small alleyways and walkthroughs to see where normal, perhaps less well off people live. It’s really fine and the worst you have to do is find your way back to any main road before just flagging the next taxi to get back to your hotel. It might be easier and slightly safer for men than women, but on the whole this is totally doable and just needs a little confidence. The best areas for this will be away from mainstream tourist spots as the city starts to spread out a little. Go far to the East or West of the city limits or beyond if you feel up for it. Again, the great shots are everywhere in Bangkok.

For street shots with more space and air in the frame around the people, try the parks such as Lumphini, Benjakit or the two larger ones which kind of cojoin as the Suan Rotfai (railway park). Think Central Park New York or Hyde Park London but not quite as busy, on a weekday at least. That is also very close to the famous, sprawling Chatuchak market (weekends only) most easily accessed from the Morchit skytrain station. In the case of the aforementioned market, it’s quite the spectacle but a very tight squeeze indeed and market vendors might not be happy if you appear to be putting them and their wares in the frame, it’s worth being aware of this. It’s also a good place to find pickpockets plying their trade and so a foreigner with a fancy camera distracted by taking photos might be a target, doable but be warned.

As I have stumbled onto warnings, let’s get them all out of the way now lest they negate the cohesion of what follows. Don’t engage with any Thai people approaching you out of the blue, speaking English in public places. Thais are pretty shy and reserved and whilst a very friendly people, they typically don’t do this as a rule;  those that do are often looking to scam you. Photographers need to know this as you will stick out as a foreigner with a camera and will certainly encounter this somewhere on your trip. Taxis are fine and a great way to get to places to shoot, even shooting from them en route can have its place but don’t get in any taxi which is already parked nearby to a tourist spot and waiting with the driver beckoning you. Walk up the road fifty or a hundred metres either way and flag a moving taxi down. Make sure he puts the meter on as soon as you get in, if not, get out immediately. Wear loose, light clothes that cover you up in the sun, sun cream for that which isn’t covered and a hat is also great to have. Need I say comfy shoes? A quick word as I struggle to stay on topic: in Thailand they do judge a book by its cover and whilst Westerners are generally viewed with respect, it’s because they are expecting you to be ‘respectable’, at least according to their perceptions and this also applies a little to how you look. You don’t have to walk around in a three-piece suit taking pictures in a tropical country but it works out better for you in general if you are not too scruffy and beach bum in your general appearance. You don’t have to wear a vest, singlet or ‘wife-beater’ kind of deal, although it’s fine at the beach. You could wear a polo shirt with a collar. You might want to wear flip flops around the city but you could wear some plain, clean Converse and compromise a little whilst still being casual and in holiday mode. Yeah, sure… Thais wear flip-flops around the place but I’m just trying to give you the inside angle a little. Not wanting to preach, I’ll move on. I only mention this at all as you will sometimes only be treated as well as you appear, really scruffy hippie Westerners are often (unbeknownst to them) looked down on by Thais who have a special name or two to stereotype such people. Not even going to go there with the cultural do’s and don’ts beyond this as it’s too far off topic for photography specifically and you need to (easily) do that homework elsewhere. Please drink more water than you feel you need to when taking pictures outside for prolonged periods of time. Patronising? Perhaps. Essential? Definitely.  Use the skytrain and subway a lot and have your camera ready when you do, as the process of using this mode of transport is just as likely to yield great people shots and candids in its own right as the destinations to which it is taking you.

The very things that photographers based in Bangkok never, ever want to shoot again are probably the very things that you will love to make frames of on a Thai holiday. The ‘usual suspects’ top three would have to be tuk-tuks, temples and saffron-robed monks in any setting. Honourable mention goes to beggars and street vagrants of questionable mental health, of which there are very many in Thailand. It’s always interesting to me that whilst many photographers abhor the idea of taking seemingly exploitative pictures of the down and outs in their own, often developed countries, something about shooting tramps and beggars in far away exotic places somehow makes it all alright. They feel the need to embrace their inner ‘Steve McCurry’ about it all.  Photos of real life are okay in any country to my mind, as long as you are not looking to humiliate or portray people in a way that exploits and you handle yourself respectfully… I see no issue. Then there’s the more advanced variation on the standard motifs, a monk in a mall debating the purchase of a sophisticated new smartphone model can seem surprising and an uber-original shot to photographers on holiday here at first, but trust me when I tell you it’s been done to death. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it again though, right? Flickr results for such searches will surely confirm this contention. All this is fine, one photographer’s trite stereotype is another’s brave new world and Huxley himself wrote “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly”. Shoot what you feel.

Places to perhaps not shoot:

Be aware that if going around the ubiquitous nightlife and shady bar scene, cameras have the potential to get you into trouble quite quickly, often with nefarious individuals. Pulling out a camera in a go-go bar or nightclub is usually a bad idea.  In temples it is often ok but it doesn’t hurt to ask first or at least start of in a shy way and see if there are any disapproving glares to inform you of a possible faux pas in action. Certain large attractions such as the Grand Palace can be very off and on about what cameras they will and won’t allow and this can be frustrating, tripods definitely not cool here but small twisty Gorillapod affairs discreetly deployed in and out ofpetite bags can be okay. Inside the shopping mall centered society that Thailand has become in modern times, smartphones are ok but anything that looks like a dedicated camera is not a good move (but fine if on a strap and not being used). All malls and department stores typically have ‘no photo’ signs on the main entrance doors for all to see so you can’t and shouldn’t argue the point if you are asked to stop shooting. That said, even this is a lot more laid back then it should be nowadays and a quick frame snatched here or there is unlikely to elicit a defcon five response per se. Nobody asks teenagers to stop taking pictures with their smartphones of course; ironic really as these are sometimes as good as many dedicated cameras in their own right these days. Technology has blurred the lines here and old policies have not really caught up to how the world is today.

More Film shooter specific:

The X-rays in baggage scanning equipment at either of the Bangkok international airports will have no adverse effect on your film whatsoever, fogging will not occur. This is assuming the following caveats: The film speed is ISO 400 or lower. Faster film might well be ok too but I’ve never personally tested it so if in doubt, push 400 a stop or two. I prefer Tri x 400 at a two-stop push to a lot of the faster films anyway. You simply MUST take the film onto the plane with you in the cabin as carry on only, do not put film in baggage that is to go in the hold of the aircraft. If you do, all bets are off and the film will probably be ruined. Bangkok airports are perfectly film friendly otherwise as of 2016 and I have tested this personally myself countless times and continue to do so. A personal request for a close hand inspection of the film to avoid scanning, which is possible in some other countries, seems to be a bit unheard of here in my opinion. Just put it through the general scanner as you go through security as many times as they require and it’ll be fine.

Generally as with the rest of the world, film is a bit of a niche thing in Thailand these days and whilst it’s still popular with enthusiasts, Fuji Instax/Polaroiding teenagers and the younger retro hipster set, it’s not something which is that easy to find or ask about with the average person. It’s not exactly difficult though either with a little insight. For regular colour print C-41, the standard fare, cheaper Kodak Colorplus and Fuji Superia ilk can sometimes be found in small quantities in any generic Sino-Thai family owned three storey townhouse lab. That’s something that you will recognize as soon as you see one. They are prevalent all over Thailand on any large road or street. Often times, the entire three generations of family all live in it but only the ground floor houses the lab operation. The whole of the building front will likely serve as a huge sign, twenty metres high, typically a Fujifilm or Kodak colour scheme in the usual corporate branding. The operation’s longevity in the area will be determined by the extent of the sunfading of said shop front and the magnitude of the seemingly mandatory ad hoc display of photos in the ground floor window. For maximum bonus points, said display should comprise of a ‘before and after’ example of a previously considered unsalvageable torn photo from the forties (typically it’s an over zealous Photoshop job of somebody’s long deceased family member), several pictures of local civil servants wearing elaborate uniforms which bear more pips, badges and gold rope under the armpit than the most decorated war hero from The Somme and several pictures of no longer cool Thai pop-culture stars from at least seven years ago which thirty-two photo labs in the same postal code all claim to have taken. These are all your hallmarks of quality. Of course, you are still trying your luck but prints from such places are often really decent, cheap and very quick. The key word to get around the language barrier for print size is ‘jumbo’ which means slightly larger than postcard size and typically might be as little as 2 baht a print, all being well.  Examples of other sizes and paper types are usually on the wall in displays that you could just point to anyway. If you’re really lucky, in addition to the popular 90’s era Fuji processing machines that are often found in such joints, you sometimes stumble over a Fuji Frontier film scanner on its last legs for facilitating ultra cheap film scans of a high quality with low labour costs. Make it clear that you want ‘no Photoshop’ if using such a service or you might well come back to find the young Thai student-intern working the scanner for a ‘child in a fake Nike factory’ wage gives you back scans or prints in which everybody has been worked over to look like an extra from The Wizard of Oz. I mention these places as they are all over every city in Thailand and there might be a perfectly good one that has all you need just doors away from where you are staying, worth having a quick look around when you first arrive. You’ll be lucky to score black and white at such an outlet but with the trendy hipster kids trying their hand with a bit of film here and there, you sometimes see a few rolls of Kentmere or something in the background.

Other cities around Thailand also have these same photo labs everywhere on the main roads and they are just as easy to find. However be advised that by now, the ones that offer film processing will be a lot less prevalent as their sole business model will typically just be making prints from digital images. It’s not cost effective for them to keep running the film machinery. There’s often just one photo lab in a small to medium sized rural Thai city that might still develop film for you and if the one you go into doesn’t have the service, they will almost certainly know which of the other labs do. They’ll tell you the name or help you find it, it’s no lost business to them after all. I know the following cities still have at least one photo lab that devs film:  Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phuket, Khon Kaen, Udon Thani, Kanchanaburi, Pattaya, Hua Hin,  Ayutthaya,  Ubon, Saraburi and  Rayong (black and white, colour e41, scans and same day, often very fast development at the green Fuji shop opposite the Post Office!)I am sure that there will be equivalents of cities of at least these sizes. You’ll struggle to find anything other than colour print film once you get out of Bangkok but you can still get it in larger cities. I bought black and white film in Chiang Mai in December of 2015 and they even had devving services on offer up there as well (Photobug) which was nice to see. It was very easy to find Kodak Colorplus in different places in Chiang Mai also. Hopefully this all gives you some idea of what to expect.

For the less risk adverse, here are some Bangkok safe bets for finding film and services of a greater variety and quantity. I have no affiliation and stand to make nothing from these recommendations but these places as of 2016, will surely see you right. ‘Photogallery’ is not the easiest find up on the higher floors of Thaniya Plaza, Soi Thaniya (Skytrain station Sala Daeng) but this is probably my current number one pic. The owner is fair and honest and maintains two large commercial fridges, which are nearly always packed full of the good stuff. Kodak, Ilford, Fuji are often in stock as well as some large format and wildcard bets like those Impossible films from the Netherlands. Probably the best place to buy black and white film right now with ease in the city, if you are on holiday and don’t know the place. If you can’t get something here, you’ll still usually be able to get its equivalent in another brand and you’ll get help and advice in that regard if you need it. The shop also has lots of decent film cameras and lenses in featuring basic Japanese brands all the way up to the posh German stuff.  English communication is fine. Photogallery are open Monday through Saturday from around very late morning to early evening

One of the best large labs in Thailand for doing just about anything above and beyond the basic c41 run is probably ‘Procolorlab’. Alas they are somewhat off the beaten track, hard to find and not very ‘tourist English language drop in visit’ compatible. The good news is that Photogallery regularly deal with them and so for a slight surcharge you can go through them. I mention this as it’s darned handy for something like E6 slides or having real optical enlargements done. It’s all sent by motorcycle messenger so you don’t have to do any running around. There is another lab of repute called “IQ lab” on Silom road (another branch near Ekamai) and although they have great equipment and a long standing reputation, it’s a pricier place overall and their services are a tad diminished in recent times, they stopped doing E6 altogether last year for example. Honestly though, if you’re still shooting slide film in 2016, them’s the breaks. IQ lab do scan 4 x 5 film though but it’s a place where you can get different answers to the same question on different times and some odd scenarios depending on what materials they have in stock at any given time.

'Av Camera’ is very close to BTS Saphan Taksin and an easy google find. It’s another long-running and reputable place to visit, it’s very small and well packed as the main business here is all things modern digital photography. You can easily find them and the map on their website. The owner is a nice gentleman who is typically sat at the table in the back of the shop on any given day. They also have a film selection in stock pretty much all the time, just less quantity and variety than Photogallery. Again, you can have devving of pretty much any film type outsourced through them reliably and messengered back over to the shop for pick up at a later date. This is relevant as you could go on an island hop and pick the film up on your way back through Bangkok without carrying your film everywhere you go. You can find a nice selection of secondhand film equipment and lenses for sale here on any given day also.  Either shop is a good go to place for repairs in an emergency, they are certainly to be trusted in this regard but only you can decide if you have the time in Thailand to make that feasible.  It’s nice to know the option is there.

A more wildcard choice is perhaps Siam Digital in Siam Square. Very easy and quick from the BTS again here with a good range of developing services and turnaround. Certainly C41, black and white and I even saw some young guy dropping off a roll of E6 there circa New Year 2016 so I know they offer it but at a slightly delayed outsourced turnaround. The rest of it is all developed by themselves in house and typically with same day service, which is nice for those on holiday and hence the reason for including them here. I have seen some mixed reviews about the quality of their processing though and have never tried them personally so I can’t promise anything here. They are a good place to find film in that area, usually a few colour choices and a fair selection on black and white from the likes of Ilford. Room temperature storage only here but that’s chilled air con temperatures anyway, or at least during office hours. If all this black and white specific processing limitation stuff puts you off, you can find Ilford XP2 chromogenic C41 process ‘pseudo’ black and white at most of the above places and then you can get that developed anywhere that does regular basic colour film processing. That opens your options up a lot for developing. To be fair, I’ve shot XP2 in bright Thai sun before and found its dynamic range to be about the most flexible that I’ve ever used and so it’s certainly a reasonable compromise option. I think you can even alter the ISO of different frames a little on the same roll and still get acceptable results back but I urge you to do your own research on that.

In the Ploenchit area (skytrain stop of the same name) you can find ‘Siam TLR’ shop on the ground floor of the Mahatun building. No experience personally but I have heard the owner is happy and friendly and there’s lots of second hand cameras to see, I suspect a few other film related services are on offer here too.

For those phototourists willing to be a little more adventurous, hop in a taxi and head to ‘Central Lad Phrao’. It’s near the very northernmost end of Chatuchak park. This is a large mall but that is not the reason to go there. The key is to just walk a short way over the main road (away from the mall) and you will see a whole collection of photo labs buildings and related businesses there directly opposite this lined along the road. Many of these places sell good selections of films and offer processing. It seems that not too many have the films in fridges but the stock is usually fresh enough. I suspect some smaller shops might buy in bulk and resell from some of these larger operations. You can get harder to find films here usually. I have bought from a great selection at ‘Photo City’ before and was happy enough. There’s also a place here in this bunch called ‘A+B Digital Lab’ which has the unusual distinction of doing fast colour processing, sometimes done in a couple of hours. You could even have lunch back over inside the mall while you wait.

Film prices vary in Thailand according to brand, but it’s not too bad overall, depending of course on where you are coming from.  In general it seems to be a little cheaper than Europe for some films and a tad pricier for others. We don’t have bargains like one British pound for 24 exposure basic C41 colour rolls as per in the UK currently, for example. Some super basic films like Kodak Colorplus 36 can be snagged for around a hundred baht if you are lucky, this is very cheap for Thailand. It’s double that for the name brand quality black and white though. Some of the slightly cheaper sources are one or two well known online shops for film that are operating within Thailand from social media sites. I haven’t included those here as you generally need to be set up in Thailand with bank accounts and a home address to order so it doesn’t seem applicable to someone passing through to shoot. If you would like this info, email me through my site and I will give you up to date info.

For a nice concentration of lots of small vintage camera shops in one place, as well as some highly skilled repair people, check out Mega Plaza on Mahachai road, you’ll need a taxi to get there. There’s one shop there in particular which has quite the reputation, it’s called ‘The Eye Camera Café’ and the nice gentleman there is considered by some to be one of the best film camera repairman in the country.

There’s a guy from Hong Kong named Eddie who runs a place called ‘Camera Collection’ in Charn Issara Tower (ground floor) around the Silom Road area. It used to sell a lot of cameras and the like but he seems busier with doing paid photography in recent times I hear. He can source all the usual cameras, lenses, films and processing services that most of the already mentioned places can. I have dealt with him a few times and found the place pretty decent and straight up overall.

Traditional darkroom space hire is a real tough one and you often need to know people or friends with their own set-ups in many cases. That said, there is one which comes highly recommended called Patani Studio. The services there vary but at the time of writing (2016) it is possible to hire the studio for a day long, eight hour block of time and the only consumable you would need to bring is your own photo paper. I think the price would be around two thousand baht. You can source this through some of the aforementioned places like Photogallery perhaps or bring your own. You can find this place at 59, Soi Nana off the Charoenkrung Road. I have to be specific here. You would do very well to ask the taxi for Charoenkrung road FIRST and then find Soi Nana off this road. The reason for this is that Soi Nana is also the name of an infamous place on the lower Sukhumvit road area which has the largest concentration of hookers and go-go bars in Bangkok. Ninety-nine percent of taxi drivers are going to assume that you want to go to the latter of course. I dread to imagine the scene when you get out of the taxi there and starting asking random streetwalkers and go-go girls if they can take you to the darkroom with a red light.

What to bring general tips:

For modern digital photography, you can buy literally anything here that you would find in any other large capital city of the world in terms of consumer electronics. Reasonable prices too. Two large places are ‘Pantip Plaza’ which was at one time the country’s number one spot for electronics but has now faded somewhat from its former glory.  I like ‘Fortune Town’ better myself but be forewarned that any geek could easily waste a day walking around this huge mall and not spend the time outside taking pictures. Bangkok might even be better than some large capitals in more developed countries in this regard in fact, don’t forget how much of this stuff is made in Asia. Storage media/cards of all brands and types are readily available everywhere and often people find that they can end up slightly cheaper here than back in their own countries at times.  Replacement batteries for various cameras are also easily sourced both for original and off brand/grey stuff in the two large malls already mentioned. Also, Nikon stuff is made here in huge quantities to a high standard. You really don’t need have to go to these big places though as most modern photographic needs are met by at least one store in just about every large group of shops and retail space that you are likely to come across as you move around Bangkok. So, no need to bring too much in the way of ‘just in case’ items, especially if you like to pack light. For powering your camera: AC mains is generally two pin or two flat prong (both work) similar to US types ‘A’ and ‘C’ and they run 220 volts. Stuff from the UK works at the correct voltage without frying anything as long as you have the correct plug adapter. I hear US appliances might be a bit trickier but have never had to test this myself. You can often just USB charge camera batteries without too much hassle and the right cable nowadays of course if in doubt. Not to get too general I hope but I would recommend a decent umbrella June through December though, for the ladies this doubles up to keep the sun of you in true Asian (and Victorian England) style but looks extremely odd for a man to do. Don’t fear the monsoon season, bad weather makes for great photos and seeing as you are on a holiday or extended photography trip, you probably don’t have to be anywhere on time anyway. If you get caught out in the heavy rain, it might be a lot heavier than any rain you have ever seen before in your life but any Thais stuck out without the right kit will be equally stuck and you can follow their lead as people generally take shelter together wherever they can. The general rule is that the more extreme and violent the rain in Thailand, the quicker it stops and just twenty minutes can make all the difference sometimes, you are then on your way. It’s obviously harder to hail taxis in the rain. Staying close to subway and skytrain stations here can be handy during these months not only for the immediate shelter benefits but also because tropical South East Asian rainfall is often incredibly specific and narrow in terms of where it hits. It’s entirely possible that it hasn’t yet rained at all just one stop down the train line from the monsoon and it’s business as usual. Strange but true. A camera bag that doesn’t look like a camera bag and is quite small, maybe just big enough for a body and two lenses is ideal for Bangkok. Any bigger and you are inviting searches when going in and out of places plus it’s just too hot to be bogging yourself down with kit. I also personally hate having backpacks and the like with me when shooting street as I feel paranoid about undesirables looking to rifle the pockets when in squashed up close quarters around the city. Another great tip that is invaluable is to get the camera out of the bag as soon as you get back to where you are staying, don’t leave them stuffed in bags in this humidity. The flip side of this is even more important, when taking a camera and lens out of an air con room and out into the tropical heat of Thailand (especially in the Bangkok heat) you should let it slowly warm up before you use it. Lenses fog and condensation clings to film inside even pro level cameras . I sometimes forget this. Last year my incredibly reliable Rolleiflex ‘E’ had a winding error. It was actually user error as I cranked it over a tad over-zealously within two minutes of leaving a freezer box hotel room. The condensation caused just a slight slippage in the film transport and the frame spacing was off, overlapping several frames before it sorted itself out. When you’ve only got twelve shots on a roll, that’s less than ideal. It had never done this before or since; I didn’t let it settle into the humidity first. User error. Heed this advice for any kind of camera

When to shoot:

It’s pretty hot and humid in most of Thailand nearly all year round, some years the cool season never actually happens. It can be colder in the North depending on altitude and time of year but for the rest of us, it’s just plain hot and sticky. You can shoot anytime but getting up early and shooting before 10-11am is a great idea. Start with the first half of the golden hour and go from there. This is sometime between 6-6:30am most of the year. Thailand is great in that it is pretty consistent in terms of daylight hours. Although it gets dark quicker at the end of the year and following few months, it still only changes by maybe half an hour or more, moving slowly between these changes so you don’t notice it that much when you live here year round. There is also no daylight saving time to account for, which I personally love. In simple terms then, you’re talking about pretty much twelve hours on and twelve hours off, all year long. It’s good to have this constant as a photographer. By the same token, shooting from 5 to 6-6:30pm onwards for the last hour and a half of light is not only more comfortable for you but it yields the best evening light to work in also. Beyond that, shooting at night is possible for film shooters as Bangkok has a lot of bright lights and neon but obviously it’s better in more mainstream areas.  Going with  ISO 1600 or 3200 film is perfectly manageable with faster lenses in such places.  Digital shooters can shoot round the clock with good modern kit regardless of course in many cases; this is one area where it is an eminently practical medium. A totally random suggestion that works well for this is the Khao San Road area. It is a good example of a place in Bangkok where you can shoot at night around lots of people with bars here and there and probably not cause too much trouble with a camera, yet you should trust your senses and gut feeling on a case by case basis. It’s also cool hippie ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ central with the current wave of gap year students rolling through every year trying to look like the counter-culture yet somehow all managing to look exactly like one another in their own mandatory style. This can be good and bad depending on your age, political leanings and levels of patience for strangers and the diatribes they can unleash upon you when well lubed with alcohol. Good for night shooting though.

Taking photos in public of Thai people:

The good news here is that Thai people are incredibly laid back and very unlikely to ever be confrontational in any given situation in general, most especially in public. You can take pictures of them but don’t get too in their faces and respect personal space, which seems a bit odd at times in such a tightly crowded city. If you want good street shots, go wider in your focal length and work with a little bit of tact and finesse whenever possible. A smaller camera is better, pointing a larger DSLR with a long zoom lens right at someone might not always meet with happy responses, but then this is true anywhere in the world and so common sense applies.

 Though there are exceptions, generally it’s no problem to walk around shooting street in Bangkok, you will be perceived as a tourist anyway so might as well live up to it. Basically, with a little practice of good street shooting techniques you can have an easy time of it. I highly recommend zone focusing, knowing your camera and lens very well, framing the shot in your mind before you lift the camera to eye level for fast shooting and not being too threatening or getting right in people’s face. Be a little bit stealthy and discreet but you don’t need to be overly sneaky or anything. I’ve rarely had a problem ever and truth be told, even Bruce Gilden could probably get away with it here, for a short while at least.  A golden rule in Thailand in general that many people learn on day one (and then forget almost immediately) also applies brilliantly to public photography here: If you smile, Thais will not be able to get angry with you. If it sounds simple, that’s because it is. Remember this, if you are caught taking a candid that you feel didn’t go down well and it has elicited frowns or other such faces of displeasure…humble, friendly smiles and walk away. That’s all you need to know.

 In Bangkok, a very basic kind of simple survival English is known to some, even though the overall standard for the country is poor. You can get shop assistants to deal with you and make a sale (or at least find someone in their team who can try) but when shooting on the street, it’s actually often useful to simply remain silent and hide behind the language barrier. This is coming from a photographer who has studied and practiced their language diligently for twenty years and has the option to use fluent Thai if needed. I’m not a fan of people who don’t make the effort to learn the language in a foreign land in general but in this scenario, I just happen to think that the ‘silent smile, slightly bowed head and keep it moving’ technique is the best communication for the situation and I’ve tested this extensively for a long time with positive results. Trust me. Please be aware that upcountry and away from tourist hotspots, the locals will be less likely to see lots and lots of foreigners and so they might react a little differently to you but that doesn’t automatically mean in a bad way. It just might be that you are an odd or unexpected sight in their day. They might also be a little more shy but it’s also highly likely that they’ll be very friendly. Your chances at blending in and being stealthy will diminish somewhat in these locales. Honestly, Thailand is just such a great place to shoot.

That is my advice and a general guide for photographers of both film and digital media for shooting in Bangkok but most of this applies pretty much as well for the rest of Thailand also. It’s a work in progress and I’ll keep adding things to it. Thanks for reading.

2017 UPDATES

The year of 2016 in Thailand was hectic, stressful and contained much distress for the Thai population at large. Regardless of these circumstances, it seems that the film shooters here were just as busy as ever, if not much more so. The sales of film in Thailand this year have been reported as very brisk indeed according to several well known suppliers and retailers of film that I have spoken to. I personally had the experience this year of either buying up the last of a pack of favourite film type  at a certain shop or just being pipped to the post by someone else buying the last packs in stock the day before. I usually have a good stock in the freezer at home but there were one or two times this year where I actually had to wait a week or so before I could get the exact films I wanted.  

Another interesting development (pun probably not intended) is that Thais have been increasingly getting into medium and large format photography and buying more of this size of film. 120 rolls and sheet films have been selling very well and there has been quite the upturn of MF and LF cameras changing hands. You won't see a big Linhof sitting around unsold for months like you often used to just a few years back. This is easy to follow as a trend, not only from direct communication with those vendors in the industry in bricks and mortar establishments,  but also from following the sales of cameras on Thai language sites and internet forums. From various sources such as websites and podcasts, it appears that in the U.S. in recently, good quality MF film gear such as Hassies and Rollies have been going up in price and selling out very quickly. I am not sure if this is a knock on effect back here in Thailand or just a general echoing of such changes but I’ve seen a similar scenario overall in Bangkok this year. 

In fact, one can even take this to a generally broader argument and suggest that many (but not all) good film cameras seem to be going north in price, at least more so than normal. A lot of young people are driving the demand, that much is clear and seems to apply here as much as anywhere. Trading of Leica glass has been really quite busy this year. One dealer I know sometimes looks like the floor of a stock exchange (on a good weekend) with punters cramming in elbow to elbow and snapping up freshly imported Leica glass from Japan. The good German stuff is (I mean in good condition, do they make any bad stuff?) changing hands very quickly and often facilitating the need to act fast if you want apotentially popular item. It goes in spits and starts at times though with seemingly nobody wanting that 35' lux for a few weeks and then five people fighting over it all at once. A key difference of late is that a lot of the younger Thai crowd that have been buying the Leitz lenses in recent years to use with mirrorless gear seem to have graduated up to just buying Leica bodies (both digital AND film) to mount them on instead.  It seems that even though the likes of the Sony bodies are better digital cameras than a lot of the Leica stuff, people just soon want to plug and play these lenses with the native cameras instead. I have seen really big increases in demand for the Pentax Super Takumar vintage lenses peaking to be much higher than just a few years ago when I last owned any of them.  There are dealers with whole drawers and dry cabinets filled with nothing but SMC Super Takumar and the like around in Bangkok currently. This is a trend that I can easily agree with. These lenses are sometimes referred to by one respected dealer I know in Bangkok as 'Leica Japan' and the quality of the glass and the images they produce are truly amazing. I have some classic shots of loved ones that I took with these lenses in years gone by that I really cherish. I would say that in Bangkok now these are definitely a current trend and very popular for use with the adapters on all of the mirrorless bodies, I have seen these kind of rigs all over the city on numerous recent outings.

For film labs I still highly recommend Procolorlab, Patani Studio (ring first as this guy is often out shooting and he has become busier in 2016, he also still does E6 slides on site with good work and turnaround!) and relative newcomers Airlab doing great work and winning over a whole lot of people (although, be aware that it’s jam packed at certain times and especially weekends as a wall to wall hipster central, consider yourself warned). They are all on Google and Facebook under the above names and all of them update their pages pretty regularly. Do try all the generic photolab 'Mom and Pop' townhouse stores in Bangkok (read the original full article above for more details on these) near where you are staying though as it's often surprising how many seemingly defunct looking places will still process C41 though. For B and W you will need to stick with the specialist labs or do your own (highly recommended anyway). As always, a good soft option still might be to try a chromogenic like Ilford XP2 (very often in stock at Photogalleryshop) if you wanna shoot B and W here and get it developed easily and locally whilst you are still in Thailand. I always think of this as a tourist’s dream option for B and W on holiday with no hassles if you can’t wait to get back to your own country and develop.

Here follows some more extensive detail on other good shops at the current time and also repairs, spares and specialist work which have not yet been covered in depth on this article before:

Get a taxi to take you to ‘Mega Plaza’ in an area often simply known as ‘Wang Burapha’ (also known as the ‘Saphan Lek’ area). You’ll easily find it on Google maps but it is a real pig to get to and so I just recommend a taxi ride. You can't mistake it once it's in your line of sight, surrounded by (real) gun shops, it has a huge sign in English and the whole place is garish orange from the outside. It's a six storey, medium sized mall which is most famous for being the centre of all things geeky and toys. This is the place people come to for knock off Chinese Lego, BB guns, real Gundam kits, hobby supplies, RC cars/planes, Playstations and games etc. It's probably one of the best places in Thailand for all of the above. That's not why you should go there however. If you go up to the fifth floor on the escalators in the very middle of the building (don't get that wrong as there are two sets) you can then turn to your right as you get off at that floor and you will find yourself in vintage camera sales and repair heaven. There are more than twenty or thirty tiny little shops (rented booths in all honesty but some are more grand and ‘shop-like’ than others) here offering all things good in camera land, with a heavy bias towards film bodies. In fact, this is the only place in Thailand where you could approach a dealer, ask about repairs for your camera and the first thing that they will say is …' We ONLY repair film cameras!" How's that for a rare response in this day and age? 

This little zone is only about half of the size of the entire mall on this floor but what you can't find here, probably doesn't exist anywhere in Thailand. They have it all, including some really left field and esoteric stuff like a Leica MDa or perhaps a Speedgraphic for the weekend sir? Several of the little shops here are purely repairs only with some very well respected and capable repair techs plying their trade in full swing. This is the place you come to make the impossible possible. I have seen guys here repairing things like Nikon F5's and they just happen to have that 'whole board' or just the one LCD section that you need and they can somehow get it all together and working again. You know that is not an easy service to find but this is the place. They can work wonders on mechanical stuff, I have recently discovered that some of the already recommended retail shops in this guide send their camera repairs to guys in this place and then add on their small commission on top so if you are not in a rush and feeling brave, you could theoretically cut out the middle man and take a chance on dealing directly with skilled techs yourself. The obvious problem here might be the language barrier though, especially if the fault were intermittent or hard to describe. For more obvious camera problems or if you had a Thai friend to help explain, it would be fairly straightforward.  This is no Tokyo camera shop but by local standards, there are some great shops here with decent inventories of great film cameras and also worth a look for classic (and sometimes modern) glass even for digital shooters of course. One problem here though is some of the vendors are unrealistic about pricing at times and approaching them as a foreigner with no Thai language skill is certainly unlikely to help them ‘re-evaluate’ their pricing. You can also find lots of film types for sale, there is a good general variety although often not in massive quantities. Lots of places here will also have a wide range of photographic accessories of a very specific nature that might be hard to source elsewhere so if you have a tricky and weird item to source, this place is your best bet (filter of an odd size, mechanical cable release anyone?)

So, whilst at Mega Plaza then, and to try and be as helpful as possible, I would like to add a newcomer or two to the recommend dealers list (no affiliation and like all recommendations on my website these are actual people that I have personally bought from and had good experiences and been treated well).  'TheEye2' camera shop (unit B507 with a yellow sign, it's small and not easy to find, if you do a 180 degree u turn when getting off the escalator on the 5th floor and walk back on yourself to the back of the building, you'll find it straight ahead). The lady owner is friendly and fair and will haggle with you a bit. You can also trade in and trade up etc. She has a large selection of classic Leica glass at all times but also lots of other great stuff. She is also directly connected to somebody reputable in another unit on the 5th floor who only does repairs but it's better to go through her first as the repair guy is not much of a one for friendly chit-chat and the price isn't any higher if you go through her as they are connected. Again, this store is on Facebook under thatname and they are very active with almost daily updates of what's in stock at any given time.

Just for a quick recap then my personal names and places of people who are good to deal with for glass and bodies (and usually film) and who won't rip you off, as of Jan 2017:

Kuhn Boonlue (a great guy) at Photogallery Shop (on facebook) inside Thaniya Plaza Sala Daeng, Silom, Bangkok (connected directly to the BTS Skytrain! Nice old glass, Leica bodies and lenses, good MF and LF equipment. Still probably my fave place for buying large amounts of film which is kept in a proper fridge!

Khun Mana (a very well known and reputable fair chap) at 'AV Camera' (close to Saphan Taksin BTS station and also on Facebook) Large selection of used Leica glass here! Their used section on their website is updated daily with prices and clear descriptions.

Khun Meow (fair and friendly woman trader) at TheEye2, 5th floor Mega Plaza, Wang Burapha, Sapah Lek, Bangkok.

I also find ‘The Shutter’ (another medium sized store just a few doors away from ‘TheEye2’ in the corner of the same floor) to be very good and fairly priced for all brands and lenses in great condition but their prices are good to start with and they really don’t want to haggle at all. The lady there is friendly and a patient, smiley type.

The first two are closed on Sundays, Khun Meow might be open then. I wouldn't go to any of them until at least lunchtime, but no later than 6pm.

Although this is veering into true caveat emptor territory, and might not be the most practical for shooters passing through Bangkok for short trips, I still would like to add something into this guide about direct, private sales of second hand cameras and lenses in Bangkok. A brave wildcard option might also be to try your hand at deals with the public and buying from somebody in Bangkok directly. Obviously the usual warnings apply and you need to decide what levels of risk you are comfortable with. It also helps if you are buying things that you know a bit about. The best webpage for my money in this area of the local Bangkok market (but also applies to other cities in Thailand) would be to google (ThaiDphoto) and click on the uppermost google search linked page. You actually don’t need to read Thai to see the equipment name for sale (nearly always in English) or the price and phone number in Arabic numerals. This is the buying and selling room of what was once a very small and quite irrelevant little site which by chance happened to become one of the busiest camera equipment trading rooms online for the whole of Thailand. The page is constantly being added to with new threads for stuff for sale all the time. A busy day might be forty new threads. This is strictly the domain for those who can get someone to speak Thai and help them with any transaction. Most people want to meet up at a Skytrain or MRT subway station and do a deal there in a large public place so it's not too dangerous on the whole as long as you use common sense. I mention this as somebody on holiday in Thailand could easily get a hotel receptionist to make the call, offer a price and get the seller to come and wait for you at an agreed time in the hotel lobby where you are staying on the skytrain or somewhere. This would be easy and quite safe and all on CCTV with security guards around the place so there's really no reason why not. You will find most sellers are happy to meet up with you and so this option is just something I thought I would throw out there as there is a brisk trade on such sites and you might well see somebody selling a lens or body that you really want right now and you just need a local to make one phone call to make it all happen. I have bought a few items from people on this website and had great experiences myself. There are certainly dealers on here also, either masquerading as private sellers or just happy to fess up to using this as an additional channel to their existing business, perhaps under a different name or whatever. No Ebay fees or Paypal nonsense though, you see, you touch, you like and you buy, or not as the case may be. You will have to decide what is best for you and what you are happy with. It's easier to check something like a lens there and then maybe, a mechanical film body might have a hidden fault that doesn't show up for a couple of minutes when you first look at it with a view to buy, like a lazy shutter in a Rollieflex that the guy makes sure he gets loosened up just before he meets you. All things that need to be considered I guess.

APRIL 2017 UPDATE:

Please be advised that as of recent months, IQ Labs no longer do any colour 35mm (c41) processing whatsoever, this applies to both Ekamai and Silom branches. No big deal really as there are lots of other options out there and IQ tended to be on the pricey side with varying consistency in their service and how they dealt with people at times. It's also yet another great reason to shoot B+W and develop yourself at home anyway!

AUGUST 2017 UPDATE:  

Recently, a reader quite rightly pointed out to me that I had somehow overlooked 'Fotofile'. I was sure that I hadn't but when I checked, turns out I had. Thanks for the heads up! So, Fotofile is a chain of shops, been around for about twenty five years or so. Most of them are just everyday, common or garden modern, digital camera and accessories shops. Nothing wrong with that. The two branches in the chain which warrant a mention are, in the first instance, The ground floor branch in the MBK centre (BTS Siam or National Stadium Area). This is a small shop about half way back in the centre, near the main side entrance which lies under the pedestrian bridge crossing that takes you to the Siam Square side of the main road. This shop sells all the new stuff as well as LOADS of good second hand lenses and digital (AND) film camera bodies. A real haven for fans of Canon and Nikon mount glass, lots to choose from, you can fondle and haggle a little. Not much in the way of huge discounts here though for sure. The pricing often seems a little bit too arbitrary for my liking, as though it depended solely on the mood of the person who put the lens in the display case on any given day. Still a pretty decent little place to check out though for sure, they have a small selection of films for sale there although not usually kept in a fridge (unlike Photogallery in Thaniya Plaza). There's another branch of Fotofile that goes under another name 'Camera and Lens' inside Central Rama 3 and this is a cute mash up of a small but fully authorised Leica dealer and a kind of glossy display of older Leica gear in the vein of a mini-museum. As well as looking cool and being quite interesting if you are into the red dot, it's also a branch that seems unusually good at procuring hard to find Leica parts such as older, obscure hoods and filters etc. At least that was the experience that I myself had there a couple of years ago. Recommended if you like that sort of thing.

'CAMERA COLLECTION'  at the Charn Issara Tower in Silom seems to have moved in recent times. I was there yesterday in that building and was surprised to find that old shop is now a hair salon! A little investigating on their social media posts and it seems that they have moved here instead:

 River city 3rd floor as Hummingbird foto. 23 Trok Rongnamkhaeng, Si Phraya Pier, Yota Road, Sampantawong, Bangkok 10100, Thailand. Please feel free to meet me (The owner Eddie, NOT anyone from Chromacomaphoto.com) there! (Please make an appointment)

There hasn't been a lot of activity on that Facebook page since they posted the new address a few months ago so let's hope that no news is good news and Mr. Eddie is still in business. Any reader of this blog who can either confirm or deny (a bad skill set if you want to work for the U.S. government, I'm sure) that 'Camera Collection' is doing okay at the new venue, feel free to drop me a line at the address shown on the bottom of this (or any) page on this site. Thanks.

OCTOBER 2017 UPDATE:

As I only like to recommend places or services that I have personally used or have been used by people who I know and trust, here follows some more detail as of October.

There is a lab up in Chiang Mai (in addition to Photobug, which is already in this guide) which has been running for a while now. It's run by two young ladies who were ex students of the local university there and who previously formally studied film photography and darkroom work. It's always nice to deal with people who also have a personal interest in the work themselves. They were known for a time on Facebook (and at the actual shop) as 'Ung Handcraft Darkroom Shop and Gallery' and that was the name with which I was still calling them. However, the same outfit is now seemingly known by another name 'Rakuda Photo Aritsans' and is still at the same place, it's a first facebook hit on Google presently under that name and so an easy lookup for their current preferred contact details/phone number etc. They even do push/pulling processing B+W and C-41 etc so it's a pretty legit service.

I know two people close to me who have used the services of the above place, under both of those different trading names. General feedback was pretty good and the ladies there are generally well-informed, happy and friendly. One possible complaint though was that the service was a bit too laid back and opening times, developing times and (especially) finished post-dev film and scans collection times should be taken with a pinch of salt. (to that point, the Facebook page of the old shop appears to even show a dialogue from an unhappy foreign customer who had to wait an hour later than the usual shop opening time to get his negs back, only to then discover five minutes before boarding his flight that they had even given him the wrong negs back, yikes!). DO NOT leave important stuff such as developing films here down to the last minute if you are facing a time critical situation such as needing them for a project or you are leaving the country with the films and scans the next day etc. Never mind what the shop tells you, it's not worth the stress, there's a good chance things can mess up.

The stuff is ready when it's ready and this might well be different from what you are actually told. This is a good rule of thumb to follow in general for almost all of the places mentioned in the guide to be honest. Things work here in Thailand in a very different way to Western countries. They might open today at the stated time, they might not. They might open later than normal or they might be closed on that day despite what it says on the door. You might get your film back today, or you might not. We might have the film in stock that we told you we had over the phone before you arrived, or we might not The customer is NOT always right in Thailand and your consumer rights are massively diminished compared to Western Europe or the States. This is not a critique of Thai culture, this is NOT a moan, this is merely an observation and one that you are highly advised to try and accept if at all possible...'cos you sure as hell ain't gonna change it :-)

I am often a fan of the wall of photolabs and film shops opposite Central Lad Phrao, they are accurately mentioned above in this guide already quite a bit. I just thought I'd mention them again today as although I rarely shoot colour, I did recently and got my stuff devved at 'Color Image' in the main row of shops there (02 9392624) and had nice results indeed. As this is very recent, I know this labs output is currently excellent and so I shall mention one of these shops specifically by name for a change as they deserve some credit. There are many others right there with similar services of course.

You'll also get B+W devved around there easily enough but personally I still highly recommend you to develop your own if at all possible.

Patani studio still going strong, still doing B+W, C-41 colour and even yes, wait for it....STILL doing E6, what a legend! His scans are as good as his wet prints, the lab space and time is still available for rent. The guy is also a real enthusiast,not just doing it from a business point of view, which is always nice. He does go out and about and shoot quite a bit so never a bad idea to contact him first, Facebook etc

A number of people have told me great things about 'Neno Camera' and lab on Lad Phrao Soi 80. (082 3535263 for Thai, if you wish to try and communicate with them in English, this number might be better:081-830-5630.). He's apparently a really well-versed gentleman and I think has even taught certain aspects of film and lab work before in a formal educational context. They are a good source of film and their Facebook page says (in Thai) that they also have darkroom rental available. Looks like they can handle 35mm, medium format and even large format in it too! Their enlargers seem to be top notch and they seem to also offer darkroom workshops from time to time, although these are aimed at Thais, in Thai one would assume. Some nice development stuff is also sometimes seen for sale on their facebook page, one to watch. I will have to say though that although I am certain it looks really good, I haven't yet personally been there or used them myself so I will not officially give them the Chromacoma gold standard recommendation until then. Probably will go there soon however, and as always...I will keep updating this info on an ongoing basis.

DECEMBER 2017 UPDATE (end of year round-up):

Thanks to everybody who comes to this site for keeping up with me and checking back here again to see what is going on. 

In the last two months I have seen the normal general trend of young people walking around with vintage film cameras ramped up to an eleven out of ten on the usual scale. One day last month whilst walking and shooting around Chinatown, I saw a line of young university student girls (maybe a dozen strong) and nearly a half of them were packing 70's and 80's film SLR's. I stopped and chatted to a couple of them and they really were shooting film, it wasn't just a case of kids toting cameras around with no film inside for cool points. I know that Thai photography courses at main universities often still require students to shoot on film only for the first year and also to do their own dev and darkroom work, which I think is a great idea. However, the young people whom I often see are not always uni students, they are just an increasing large group of young people shooting film per se. 

This is supported by the fact that whilst walking around Mega Plaza lately, I noticed the vendors who used to sell a little film here and there and maybe had no more than fifty rolls in stock often now sell a much, much larger volume and a greater variety too. When talking to such vendors they also confirmed that the huge surge in film trade throughout this year is definitely due to larger numbers of younger people buying film in Bangkok right now. Nice to see.

I had experience of using  'Neno Camera' and lab on Lad Phrao Soi 80. (082 3535263 for Thai, if you wish to try and communicate with them in English, this number might be better:081-830-5630.) I didn't tell them beforehand that I run this website or that I was looking to share reports of their service. The results were great. I heard through a Thai local pro recently that Khun Neno (rhymes with 'Hey-ho' NOT with 'Nemo'!) bypasses the local Fujifilm suppliers and directly imports everything, including all the E6 chemicals, for his processing. The film devving there is really nice and clean, just as with Patani Studio...perhaps the only other really solid choice if you are shooting positive film. All film devving at Neno's place has been worthy of a Chromacoma recommendation this far for sure so I am happy to report and share that with my readers.

The branch of 'PhotoCity' that had been inside Central Pinklao for many years (formerly in the basement with the green 'Fujifilm' stickered up windows near the pharmacies and then in a newly reopened unit on the 3rd floor following the renovation of the whole mall two years ago) has closed in the last month or two. This was owned and operated by the same family as their main branch and namesake opposite Central Lad Phrao (amongst that row of so many small photolabs there that are always stocked with film and great, fast devving options, read the full guide above again for more info if you missed that). Anyway, the sister (or cousin?) branch at Pinklao was very laid back, as in... to the point of horizontal, and were rarely if ever on top of anything. I mean they were seriously all over the place service wise even by local standards and so this is not really news that comes as any great shock. The good news however is that the main branch business at Lad Phrao is certainly very much alive and kicking with business as usual. The bad news for anyone in the West Bangkok/Pinklao area is that although very slow and messy, the service did usually end up coming through and they used to send film and scanning work (Fuji Frontier to a high standard) back and forth via messenger to the mothership branch. Quite handy if you live out that way and shoot film as there are not so many great options that way really. Oh well, never mind.

Keep checking back for updates throughout 2018 on this page and also click below or on the tabs on the right for the specific and highly detailed blow by blow shooting guides series for individual places around Bangkok.

This is the current state of play and, as always, this article will be added to with as much up to date information as possible.

APRIL 2018 UPDATE:

Thanks very much to a kind reader named Devlin for drawing the 'Polaroid Bar' to my attention, they are are a fairly new, family run outfit with a whole cafe/bar concept revolving around all things Polaroid. A nice idea and a fun place to go and check out. You can find it quite a ways out of town off the Rama 9, heading out more towards the airport in an area that I would say still just about comes under the heading of 'Hua Mak" (sounds like Mark) to locals. Closed on Monday through Thursday, which seems a bit odd so I thought it worth mentioning in case it ruins somebody's trip there. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 13:00-18:00 hrs only. Found on Facebook under the name 'PolaroidBar' and they are on 7 Khwaeng Hua Mak, Khet Bang Kapi, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon 10240, Thailand +66 80 444 5603. I have no affiliation whatsoever but the place comes recommended by two Chromacoma followers so I will include it here.

CLICK HERE FOR 'PLACES TO SHOOT IN BANGKOK' (MY HIGHLY DETAILED, INDIVIDUAL GUIDES ON POTENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHIC HOTSPOTS IN BANGKOK)

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Changing Your Photography (or I hope David Bowie didn't die because of me)

Ch-ch-ch-ch changes. Changing your photography is not to be feared. Following a recent health scare and serious surgery to excise a huge tumour from my body, I had to wait for the results of the biopsy on this new part of me which had been removed. The wait was ten days. These were probably the longest ten days of my life so far. During this time I had to face several real concerns and possible scenarios, some of them were definitely not good. Deep, self-existentialist thought and a forced renewed acceptance of one’s own mortality were an unusual way to spend Christmas, but yet strangely not an entirely unfitting mindset with which to face a new year. Perspective. Priorities. Penance. When the day finally rolled around, I had to keep it moving and try to bury the worst feelings deep down in my stomach with all the old time gathered there. The news you get from doctors at such moments can be delivered giftwrapped in mercy or left like a soggy note on the door informing you of a package that couldn’t be delivered, requiring further pursuit of happiness on your part to collect. I don’t know if it’s just Thai doctors per se but the words come from their mouths in such a nonchalant manner. They can hit you like bullets from a rusty old Cambodian revolver in a cheap Thai hit, straight in the abdomen. There are rare moments when I almost wish that I didn’t speak Thai and it was all just noise, I would only then understand the English that people tried to carefully put together for my benefit during such situations and ignorance would be bliss. After he had finished checking on my large, healing wound (as I pretended to be much less worried than I really was), the doctor proceeded to tell me that the lab results had shown the tumour to be benign. The relief is hard to describe but in the words of Shelley  “I have drunken deep of joy, and I will taste no other wine tonight’, I think I can relate. Then I found out that Bowie died of cancer on the same day. I have since wondered if the universe had decided that it came down to him or me, and given me the nod. If so, I feel that a terrible mistake might have been made, but it’s like telling the waitress in the restaurant that they forgot to include the coffee on the bill.  Sure, you feel a little bit bad but sometimes you catch a break and there’s no time for the guilt fairies…keep it moving. So, in the spirit of the late Mr. Jones, and in order to justify my recent luck, I think I’ll be mixing it up a bit and reinventing my approach from now on.

 There’s been something of a photographic trend on the web in recent times to champion the simple approach in terms of less equipment and a fixed style of work. I’ve read countless sorts of articles and posts all over the shop along such lines and I have often followed the advice to ‘stick with one thing, one lens, one camera, one vision’ or other such invariable factor of choice. Less is more, you know the kind of thing. There’s definitely a benefit to that, especially if you are new to photography or looking to get back to basics but I think there’s a lot to be said for variety. Ah, beautiful Bangkok. Shooting a Polaroid of a traffic jam in the rain on a Monday, 120 colour film intense orange tropical sunrise over the city skyline on a Wednesday and rangefinder black and white film noir for the weekend sir.

 Mr. Bowie didn’t always get it right, but he kept on trying new things and kept it rolling along with new ideas and fresh style. I think that it’s almost become considered somehow ‘wrong’ by many to play around and experiment with consistently changing up your photography, be it equipment, format or style. This seems to be a paradigm shift of late. People can be quite evangelical about it as though to impose upon you how you are somehow ‘not getting’ the foundation to their self-perceived Zen picture making mantra. There’s definitely a dogma to it. I had previously been more affected by this kind of thinking than I had perhaps been aware of. I belittled myself at the idea of going out with more than one lens on my person. As though I was letting myself down by having a second focal length option. Another classic quandary for me is how much of a big deal it often seems in my head to carry colour and black and white film at the same time. It’s almost like some kind of cardinal sin in my mind, quite ridiculous really. I have decided to be less bothered about such irrationality and have some fun trying out new directions in my photography. I will try things that I haven’t tried before and take some chances.

 Bowie inspired chance taking in photography. Take a look at what the late Duffy did for the iconic ‘Aladdin Insane’ lightning bolt across the face series. They were just incredible; ludicrously expensive dye transfer reproductions from colour transparencies on plates custom made in Switzerland. Seriously? Then there’s Masayoshi Sukita’s re-imagining of Heckel’s ‘idiot’ as a hero via Bowie and his hands.  Like a lot of the best ideas, it was simple and deceptively obvious. A look later copied by contemporaries of the era on their album covers too. As for his most long standing photographer, Bowie said “Mick sees me the way I see myself”, imagine the changes that the good Mister Rock had to keep up with, more like he probably went through them himself.

 I need to catch a wind of change myself. I often feel that I’m chasing something I can’t quite keep up with in my work. On rare occasions, I get just close enough to whatever it is I’m looking for in the Bangkok negatives hanging up to dry that I feel briefly kept in that place I want to be. Yet no sooner am I in it, than it loses its appeal and I question myself as to what I’m doing there in the first place. What is it with my work? It’s maddeningly on and off.  When you do eventually get settled in a nice spot with your photography, it can become stale overnight without warning. I used to be blissfully happy shooting at one place in Bangkok; I shot one project there alone which took me five years. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.  I felt it to be akin to a river in a Hemingway story. It just kept on giving and feeling so right. Now the place bores me, it feels trite, unwelcoming and infertile…more like a dried up Euphrates.  I can’t believe the difference but I have to accept that it must be a difference within me. I know the location is still good.  I find it easy to get stuck in such a fashion. At times like this, the best way out is always through. The way through this is to make like Bowie and change. We don’t like change, knowing how (and more importantly of course, knowing when) is not always obvious to us. It can be scary and confusing and we will often go to great lengths to avoid it. I think this is why the art of photography represents a challenge to people from the very beginning.  Perhaps it also pervades our photographic lives over the long haul.  Don’t fear it, embrace it. ‘I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring’, I’m with you David…I’m with you.

 CCP

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Social Semaphore over Smoothies: The Ironies of Thai Selfie-Culture

Every genre of photography exists for a reason and fulfills a role. By far and away the largest genre prevalent in the world today is the smartphone-facilitated snapshot taken specifically for sharing on social media. Who could have known that this genre would have had such a significant impact upon not only photography but also the way people live their lives as a whole?

 Sure, this is old news, but it still never ceases to amaze me how witnessing examples of its impact on social behaviour first hand can bewilder, amuse and sometimes even sadden me as the observer.  There’s a version of these events and stories for every city and town in the world. This is what I witnessed in Bangkok recently:

 I had been shooting street, it was a day when I was pushing myself and I had got up to maybe my third roll with a 35 Summaron on the M2.  Nice weather but hot and I needed a place to sit down, sort through some films in my pocket and replenish my body with fluids in a cool place. I had sat down in a nice cold fruit smoothie establishment in a pretty slick part of the city. I was sat at the back but next to the window with Leica bits, Kodak cannisters and a light meter strewn in front of me on the nice wooden butcher style table top. I was unwittingly announcing to the world that I was probably odd or eccentric, if the world were bothered enough to pay attention to me, which of course it wasn’t. Times like these you might get a puzzled smile from an older person or a Klingon hipster trying to shoot you that knowing look.

 Through the large window I notice a young couple advancing toward this place, they were doing the annoying self-important walking whilst smart phoning and not looking up thing.  People engaging in this practice are basically relying on other people’s good will in getting out of their way. This is a classic ignorance and arrogance combination that has never sat well with me. Although it can sometimes be amusing when you see two people bumping into each other doing the same thing from different directions. I saw a guy drop his uncased IPhone to the floor once from such an affair. The jerky fumble dance that ensued as he tried in vain to catch it on the way down was almost Mick Jaggeresque. Upon hastily reclaiming his beloved device from the evil terra firma, his face looked like he had just lost a kidney. Talk about crash test dummies. I wonder what happens if a pedestrian crossing whilst texting gets hit by a motorist who is texting and driving? Would the universe have some way to just kind of let the two cancel other each out and chalk up another couple of strikes for team Darwin?

  Although I don’t always admit it, I sometimes gain twisted satisfaction in being deliberately ‘obtuse’ to these kind of offenders in public, I say the word in much the same way that Andy Dufresne did, although hopefully without  such dire consequences. I refuse to side step them, I stop short of actually speeding up and barging them head on but NO, I will not sidestep for thee. It’s on you. But that wasn’t what had really caught my attention about this pair of trendy lookers, they were both really quite photogenic and I was fervently hoping that they wouldn’t suddenly create the perfect street scene photograph right before me now in great light as I was sitting there with no film loaded in the M2. These ‘the one that got away’ moments haunt all photographers, especially those who shoot street with film cameras. The young girl was really very pretty, although she probably didn’t quite believe this herself as she was caked up in far more make up than was needed. Her boyfriend was quite the good looking young chap. It’s always a hallmark of a good looking bloke that even straight men notice how good looking you are. It’s probably a gold standard.

 They enter the scene stage left, not looking up from their phones and yet still somehow managing to both get through the door and into the establishment. There is a long high bar and stools along another window. She sits at one stool and he automatically sits two stools down from her. This immediately piqued my interest as they were clearly a couple yet it was a given that this space was needed between them and you could just tell that this was a regular and well rehearsed drill of theirs. The young guy ordered smoothies of their choice without entirely looking at the menu at all; his eyes still never left the phone. As they waited for somebody to bring their order over, both of them anxiously tried several different positions on the seat to see which angle and light worked the best. They had both decided at the same time and without any communication between them, that their entry to a humble smoothie outlet was an event that they needed to be broadcast to the world. The young lady in question briefly applies either lip balm or lipstick of some kind and then warms up with a few shots. I am only two metres or so away and her smartphone is a newer, jumbo screened affair. I can see that she has already taken at least six photos but none of them have yet met with her approval. The smoothies arrive, now she needs to include this in the frame and proceeds to take another ten frames with her mouth sucking on the straw in a goofy manner but she’s still not happy. Pretty > Goofy, try again. She takes yet more frames with the smoothie on the bar top and her pretty head at just the right angle next to it. Getting closer now, she’s honing in on the desired result but I can see that she is less than thrilled to have me in the background of the shots.  I can just make myself out in them. She moves a fake potted plant very slightly (and slowly so as to not make it too obvious) with her fingertips jus a bit at a time until my unfortunate middle age has been perfectly blocked out of the frame by a fake cactus and that’s when I realize why they have sat so spaced apart. This lady needs her own ‘selfie-zone’ studio space everywhere she goes in which she can move herself and all the props within it to represent her own perfect, trite, saccharin sweet, artificial version of reality for just 1/500th of a second to show the world.

 Don’t fear that her other half is getting his feelings hurt by accommodating such a requirement, for he himself is making full use of the space to take similar selfies of note wearing his sunglasses indoors. He’s less concerned with including the smoothie in the frame in case it compromises his high-maintenance,  fragile,  new-found masculinity. Yet nailing the perfect angle of the sunglasses and their reflection is an issue which seems to be challenging him somewhat. He has made at least twenty to thirty attempts at this shot despite being sat in good light with a very capable camera in his late model, high-end smartphone with huge display.

 Already five to ten minutes has passed. Not. One. Word.  Not so much as a non sequitur.

 I watched on. I couldn’t quite decide if it was great that they were so comfortable together that they could be like this with each other or whether it were in fact such a terrible shame that they were wasting their wonderful young days of love away uploading pictures of fruit smoothies to people that they haven’t seen since kindergarten. Desperate to plug into the grid and the hive matrix, real life was passing them by as their youth and good looks slowly melt away like the smoothies.  Too busy updating the world to actually be in it. Authors of their own irony. 'Virtual reality'…the first word means almost. This situation was almost real,  but not quite. Something occurred to me now that I’m entering middle age. I’m glad that in my first days of adulthood, a photo was something I took quickly with a compact camera and then got developed later on. I’m glad not to have missed out on that part of my life, love and relationships with others in the world due to being sucked into the matrix. I love technology but I also love life and wish to appreciate it with technology in it, not the other way around. Maybe that sounds like an old man saying “Get off my lawn”, I honestly don’t know. I’ll go one further, younger people should have their heads up more to see and enjoy the world instead of their heads down like the old people playing bingo who have already seen it.

 The two young lovers continued their routine, not once interfering with each other’s flow or (im)personal space. I have to admit, it was seamlessly done and as smooth as their beverages. There was almost a sense of choreography to it, all which unwittingly revealed just how often they had practiced this rendition. All it really needed was Ravel’s Bolero in the background and it would have been bordering on a performance art piece in its own right.

 My M2 was now loaded, the light had changed, and my cup of tea was done. I took a reading with my Sekonic, wound on and shot the first two blank frames out of the way and I was ready to go. As I stood up and got ready to leave, handsome boy had finally just about got his sunglasses to be exactly as he wanted them. By looking at him posing in his screen, I could see exactly where his eyes were gazing and he was completely oblivious to my new position or recent movement. I came in close and fired off a shot of both of them from the side. He didn’t flinch, relentless in pursuit of the ultimate selfie for the day. The M2 is a quiet machine so I went for broke and stepped in closer still to test the minimum focus range of the Summaron at around eighty centimetres, literally less than meter away from the guy’s face almost exactly square on from him at ninety degrees. I knew that he would probably catch me in the act but decided that I wanted the shot and would just smile and leave the premises as planned upon being busted. Amazingly, I took the second shot and still neither of them cottoned on. I was the invisible man. I went on my merry way.  You can see the shot of this couple on the ‘work’ page of this site (in the ‘E = Siam Squared Part II gallery).  Never did hear them speak. They didn’t even see me leave despite my doubling back around and walking past their window on the way to the next stage of my photographic jaunt. They were just so wholly consumed by sharing with their legions of adoring devotees. Were Lennon still alive today, he might have said “ Life is what happens while you’re busy making other fans.”

 CCP

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Lenses: Speed Kills (Your Thai Bank Account)

You might well have been there: Is my lens fast enough? It’s a symptomatic and worrying condition.  It often starts with the purchase of nice lens, maybe even an excellent lens. All is well at first, you like the shots you have made, it has a beautiful signature and generally performs very well indeed. It’s like the start of a new relationship over those first few dates with a new flame. It’s all going well and things feel positively hunky dory. Then it starts to creep up on you, you find yourself poring over reviews of the ‘other lens’ from the same manufacturer which is only one stop faster but twice the price (or more). You start imagining the endless extra possibilities in your photography that this magical extra stop or two could give you. Image searches of this coveted slice of top glass on the net seem to only lead to what appear to be the best photos you have ever seen in that focal length before. Suddenly you find yourself fawning and pining for the new flame’s more attractive sibling and pangs of confusion and regret slowly start to emerge in your stomach. What is then seemingly hard to find on the internet during the throes of such a condition is what you probably need to hear the most: This is often completely irrelevant to taking and making great pictures in most places, especially in a bright and sunny clime such as Thailand.

 In the past I have suffered greatly from this condition, and almost always to my financial detriment. The Nikkor 85mm 1.8 was a really, really good lens but the 1.4 had a legendary status that eventually proved too formidable an opponent. The various 35 ‘Crons I have had seemed like greased lightning when at first acquired but I just could not go on without the word ‘Summilux’ in my life. Loved the Rolleiflex 3.5, but I ultimately had to get me some Zeiss 2.8 love. What I found in general is that, as with so many things in life, paying the extra massive premium just to get that very last upper percentile of a given performance factor is often simply not worth it. I’ll even go one further, in my case; I actually found it to be detrimental to my work. With really fast lenses (let’s assume primes for the sake of argument), the trade-off for the ultra fast end of things is typically that they are not always even in their high performance throughout the full aperture range. Some high-speed lenses are not as good stopped down as their contemporaries and, to add insult to injury, they are not guaranteed to be that hot when used wide open. Think in terms of a racing car, its engine built to a high level of tune with an aggressive cam profile, super big wheels with tiny profile racing tires that are really wide. It’s really good when on the cam and giving the highest engine speeds flying through chicanes on smooth race tracks but certainly not what you want when looking to steadily cruise or start/stop drive through traffic to the local store. It would also suck the proverbial appendage on a constant long-haul drive on varying road surfaces. What do you want it for? Ask yourself this and be truly honest about it. If you are only shooting in very low light conditions with this lens, well this would perhaps be akin to racing and redlining with the speed factor, maybe you really would benefit from the high state of tune of the fast glass designs.  But if you are also shooting in daylight and under a range of different circumstances then you’ll be stopping her right down anyway. If you don’t then you’ll need to be allowing for the extra expense and hassle of ND filters and accepting any negative impact that they may possibly have on the lens that you bought for its high performance in the first place.  In Bangkok, in the daytime, things are ridiculously bright, even on overcast days. Every single Leica 35mm I have ever owned (and that’s a few now) had to be stopped right down to a minimum of f8 or more when shooting outside pretty much any time after six thirty in the morning and before sunset. I would only use the wide-open capabilities of the ultra fast glass for maybe two half-hour periods during every twenty-four hours, unless I was a big night shooter, which I tend not to be in general. The other twenty three hours of the day, my glass would not only be just fine, but perhaps even better than the faster option. That assumes using film and Tri X at ISO 400. Yes, I could use slower film but I prefer not to. I have noted that at these apertures, in real life usage, all of these lenses looked very similar and equally fantastic. In fact, the cheapest one I have ever owned is the old-school brass and chrome 35mm Summaron 2.8 and I think I like the look of this over all the others (including ‘crons and lux’s of a similar vintage) during the daytime. It’s also very small and handling is among the very best of any lens I have ever used on any camera.

 How I used to love my 35 ‘lux pre-asph. I have even bought (and subsequently sold) two of them. I have learned that lenses are like jobs and relationships, once it’s over and you’ve left, you should never go back and try again. It’s never as good, and if it had been that good, you probably wouldn’t have left. The Canadian made lux’s form factor, its speed and handling were all sublime. Yet in all honesty though, wide open it was a real crapshoot and the frames came out with lotto scratch card like odds, all over the place in low-light, even down another stop and it wasn’t always gravy. I’m picking an unfair example perhaps as this lens is well known for being a handful when wide open but it’s a common enough trait applicable to many fast primes. With my lux, Ninety-five percent of the time I was at f2 or more anyway and at such apertures, it wasn’t any better than the rest. Good glass is expensive and decisions need to made accordingly, if it’s to be a monogamous relationship, if she will truly be your one and only, then get something that works well as an-all rounder and is easy to live with. Highly fast lenses can be fussy prima Donnas, for real life you want an Emma or a Debbie instead.  For film users, pushing your film a couple of stops or using a faster film will still get the baby bathed. Night photography is all about the shadows and darks anyway, when using super fast film at night, it can just look like daytime shots and I personally don’t much care for that. I think I prefer Tri X pushed a couple of stops than super fast night films anyway. Point being, you have low-light options for nice results that don’t mean selling a kidney. If you’re on digital, I really don’t see the need for speed these days with such great low light performing sensors abound in so many different camera types.

 If you are still not convinced, perhaps at least look at systems where the faster options are still reasonably affordable, Leicaland is not a nice place to be for those with a speed habit of Walter White customer proportions and limited funding. Nikon is not a bad brand in this regard as their reverse lens to body compatibility is nearly as good as Leica and this means that many examples of manual-focus faster lenses can be had for fair money, on account of their age.

 Mine is not to suggest that all fast glass is to be avoided per se or that all such lenses are inherently bad performers across the board. There are many good all-rounders that also happen to be on the faster end of things, I’m merely advising against the perils of assuming that faster always means better. It often simply isn’t the case.

 Voltaire said that “Perfect is the enemy of the good”. With modern lens designs and manufacturing, this can even be the very good. Be honest with yourself and be practical, all modern lenses are likely way better at their job than we are as photographers. Will you really out shoot your glass? Look at what the masters did with the limited lenses of decades past. Think most bang for your Thai baht and have some sympathy for your bank account in these frugal times. You’ll feel great getting the best shots ever ‘despite’ the lens rather than ‘because’ of it. It’s honestly mostly nonsense if you really think about it. Just because there are no speed limits on the road to photographic success, doesn’t mean you have to drive down it the fastest.

 CC

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Dear Retro Cameras In Thailand: I Want My Camouflage Back

A definite photographic change has been slowly afoot in Bangkok. The new retro-look camera seems to have been the catalyst for this change. At first I thought it might have just been my own imagination, or a false perception of mine in some way. Now I am decided, the newer cameras of a more vintage design have slowly taken back a previously built-in advantage to somebody shooting street here with an older film camera. I clearly recall up to around 2011 or so, my chrome and black Leica M6 classic occupied a lovely spot on the photographic equipment continuum. It almost seemed to be like a Germanic cloaking device for discreet image making. The typical reaction to it would vary but in general it would either elicit quaint smiles, indifference or simply no reaction whatsoever. Back then, as long as it wasn’t a large, matte black SLR/DSLR body with the usual long lens sporting a brightly lettered yellow or red corporate-branded camera strap…it was almost certain to be under everybody’s radar. Didn’t have to be a fancy-pants Leica of course, a black and chrome seventies SLR with a small lens on might also have faired similarly well but something about an old rangefinder in that classic look with a little patina here and there really got the job done.

Then it all changed. Looking back I now have a clear memory of exactly when that tipping point was. Of course, as is so often the case with pivotal moments, you don’t see them for what they are at the time. Only in retrospect does the significance and detail play a part. I think it was in 2011, I was commuting by Bangkok skytrain. Arriving at my stop, I found myself in that less than completely comfortable purgatory state between not being as early as I would have liked for work and in danger of, but not quite yet, being late. As I walked hurriedly through the shopping mall that obstructed the route between the train and my place of work, I took a glance in the usual camera shop window and noticed something odd catching my eye. At first I thought the owner of the shop selling all the digital gear was just having some fun showing off his prized, boxed Leica M film camera on the shelf to add a certain sizzle and window dressing. I then took a closer look and saw a Fuji X100 for the first time; it was in a nice box lined with some kind of classy looking satin material. The material served as a beautiful way to contrast against what was increasingly likely to be a digital camera in front of my very eyes. The black, the brushed silver metal, the rangefinderesque windows on the front. An obvious rip off but very well executed. I viewed it without tension, trauma, hate or neurosis, which served as evidence of how right they got it from the start in identifying this new market. I had a hundred questions of course but the shop was closed and the clock was ticking against me.

 Later on, the full extent of what I had witnessed was revealed unto others and myself all over the web. The rest, as they say, is history.  History is best defined as our sources of information combined with our expertise in processing them.  I didn’t really process the information from the sighting of this thing very well at the time and now I can look back and see how this crept up on me. Fuji wrote history their way and much as I loathe the term ‘game changer’, in fairness… this might actually be one case where the hat fits. Anyone doubting that need only look as far as the veritable smorgasbord of small cameras in a chrome and black retro style that have since emerged over the past five years or so. Frankly, it has been a little hard to keep up, even for the camera geeks. It now seems as though any Thai kid who feels the need to have a photographic device in addition to their smartphone (admittedly a shrinking group but that might best be reserved as a topic for another day) is brandishing such a camera style. There was a strong ‘you better have a big DSLR on your person at all times to look like a pro or you ain’t s*#@t’ movement prevalent in Bangkok that was truly hard not to notice in recent years. Kids taking pictures of the food they are about to eat in restaurants using full sized pro Nikon D digital bodies designed for professional sports photographers was something that I personally witnessed many times. However, it seems as though many of its adherents have now become turncoats, crossing over to salute the new flag of smaller, often mirror less black and chrome kit. Just a perfect match for ripped skinny jeans, large square-fronted baseball caps and a cool T-shirt whose English meaning might not be completely understood by them as they wear it.

 Of course, ultimately I am happy that so many young people now love buying cameras and that they dig the retro vibes. I even believe that history has in some extreme cases come full circle. Some young people who have used modern retro-looking cameras have found them to be a gateway drug for actually buying some of the real old film cameras upon which their digital descendants were based. To be fair, it isn’t just the young ‘uns. This is a photographic paradigm shift that has occurred throughout the older demographic of camera carrying Thai people also. That can’t be a bad thing besides photography doesn’t need any more old men on lawns telling the kids to go and play in front of their own houses. I’m just grumpy to have lost that little edge. I am now forced to be more inventive with my approach for stealthy and innocent (preferably film) cameras capable of delivering excellent results on Bangkok streets. The TLR world via Rolleiflex is proving to be the perfect thumb in the dike for me presently. Of course, it is now so old and quaint that it can actually elicit compliments and conversations from the very strangers that I am trying to shoot, something of an own goal perhaps. Not to mention the appearance of the odd digital camera in a TLR style on the market here and there in recent times. Maybe five years from now every hipster will be ‘rocking a twin lens’ and they will be less incognito also. Still, Churchill said that ‘success consists of going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm’, maybe I should just walk around Bangkok grinning like a maniac with an 8 x 10 camera on a huge wooden tripod and shoot with a large black cloth over my head like Meyerowitz.

 The hipsters would never cover their heads like that, nobody would be able to see how cool they were and I would be more camouflaged than ever. Mm, I might be on to something.

CCP

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Picasso, Breasts, Bangkok...What Can Photographers Around the World Learn from the Master Painters?

A good few years ago now in Thailand, I went back to full time education. I have to confess that the use of the word ‘back’ is a falsification of sorts that I have become accustomed to slipping into this sentence with alarming ease and comfort. We all do it, that little white lie that has fallen out of your mouth in relation to a given topic to save personal embarrassment so often that you actually somehow believe it to be true yourself. This implies that I was somehow there in the first place (in adulthood at least, this isn’t entirely true). Actually what really happened was that I enjoyed a wonderful period in my life being a ‘mature student’. Although a charming euphemism for ‘older person who amounted to very little in their youth’ I must confess to since having grown a tad fond of this term. I think that for many people such as myself for whom regular school just was never going to work out back then, there comes a real satisfaction in learning about the arts (in my case) at a later station in life. If you can handle the level of self-discipline, newfound time management skills and motivate yourself towards full-time study alongside a career, kids and everything else that life throws in your face….you are already on the way to winning the game of life in no small measure.

It was all going well, but like so many university students in their first year, we were first forced to study a more general course than we would have liked before earning the right to specialize more deeply in our chosen courses. I was horrified to discover that I had to study about (and critique) paintings ranging from the renaissance through to the twentieth century. Long essays were demanded.  I cringed at the idea of joining the ranks of these pretentious dilettantes in the world, endlessly bleating nonsense about dead people’s moody daubings as a means to further aggrandize their self-importance to others.  I recall late nights poring over the full colour prints in the mandatory course books. I noted that although I found most of what I saw to be generally beautiful to my crude eye, the idea of a regular bloke like me actually constructing sentences to critique Francesca and Raphael’s work seemed downright ludicrous. I mean, where does one even begin?

As a way in, I tried to look at my favourite photographs of the twentieth century, and make notes about what I liked about them. I focused a lot on portraits, as these were often the closest things photographically to many of the paintings that we had to choose from for our essays. Looking back now I realize how stupid I was at first in being perfectly okay with having a working knowledge of the photographic medium and yet failing to recognize its relevance to the paintings thrust upon me. Many renaissance painters were the portrait photographers of their day of course.  It’s actually not that hard to find photos that are lit like a Vermeer or a Titian, and I didn’t notice that this sidetrack I had gone down was becoming a strangely enjoyable pursuit in itself. The way that these great painters saw light had to be just as important as to any photographer since. I became a touch disappointed at myself for never having made more of an effort to study this previously. In hindsight, this is the good thing about the first year of such a degree; it forces you to study things that you would never have chosen to of your own accord. Through this situation, you can discover new things about yourself and the world that really open your eyes. It’s never a bad thing. My first few essays on this faired better than I had expected, despite a particularly cruel professor in that year. By the final paper of the term, we had reached the lofty heights of twentieth century art and were given a choice of just three paintings to critique, the required essays were now of a much increased minimum word count.  The paintings were obviously carefully chosen as works that had had a lot less written about them in the usual places, woe betide anyone looking to plagiarise or paraphrase one of the few articles out there at the time on them. I chose Pablo Picasso’s ‘Girl in a Chemise’ (google it lest I be sued by one of his relatives for its inclusion here) from his blue period and I based my approach on the way I would look at a portrait photograph. However I was sure to use all of the technical terms of analysis that we had been taught throughout the course for the discussion and critique of fine painting. I felt it was perhaps a bit of a gamble but had secured enough reasonable scores at that point in the term to feel confident with such a move.

I’ll spare you the full essay but here is a key extract from what I wrote:

“The painting ‘Girl in a Chemise’, by Picasso is a portrait, painted around 1905.  It is an oil on canvas measuring approximately 72.7 by 60 cm. The girl is the sole subject and the picture plane puts us so close that we may only see her from the waist upwards. The view of the subject is from the front and slightly angled. Her head is turned away to her left, as though to repel any empathy, affording us only a single sided view of her face and upswept hair. Onto her emaciated frame, Picasso adds a provocatively oversized breast, which penetrates into an almost spiritual blue halo. The modelling of her diaphanous garment around the collarbone is detailed enough to emphasize its flimsiness.  There seems a paradox between her wraithlike appearance and her exuded sexuality. Our main focus is drawn towards her porcelain face, gaunt expression and dead eyes.  The modelling of this translucent face is more detailed and caricaturial than that of her lower torso, perhaps because of the wider tonal range between figure and ground at this point on the literal plane. The brushwork elsewhere seems perfunctory, with less merging of colour and some paint runs in the background. The room the girl is in appears dark and cold with a small light source on the top left side, out of our view. The subject looks as though her skin would be very pallid and clammy to the touch. The artist used a contrast of light subject against dark blue and green background to impart not only a melancholy darkness but also a cold, disconsolate atmosphere to the illusionistic plane as a whole. Even the warm tones of her rose shawl fail to permeate Picasso’s chill.”

 I was very lucky to have received my highest score for that course from this essay but perhaps luckier still to have been educated in how to look at, analyse and enjoy the fine paintings of the masters and relate them to my existing love of photographic art. I later had an exam on this (even had to fly to the U.K. for the pleasure of sitting it) within a tight time limit but really enjoyed it and did reasonably well overall. I wonder how many other photographers also enjoy (or would enjoy) this exercise? It was an undertaking that I wouldn’t have otherwise chosen to embark upon, and one which certainly took me out of my comfort zone. I recall that I felt awkward and uneasy about trying (what I perceived to be) something I wouldn’t be able to do. I later learned that Pablo once said “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” Turns out that we have might have something in common with the great painters after all.

 CCP

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Dickens Meets Nikon (50 1.2 Ais / 50 1.4 Ais): A Tale of Two Fifties

It was the best of primes, it was the worst of primes, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of (low) Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

  I had everything before me, I had nothing before me, I was going to photographic heaven, I was going direct the other way and my bank balance was soon to follow. In short, that period in photography was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest internet experts insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of photographic comparison only.

 There were a king of an ultra-fast lens with a large jaw in thy local camera dealers and a queen lens with a plain face, on the throne of my camera shelf. In both cases, they were clearer than crystal and to the Gods of photography, the local bank manager and preservers of State to film and developing chemicals, such things were settled for ever.

 It was the year of Our Lord two thousand and fifteen. Spiritual and optical revelations were conceded throughout England and the rest of the world at that favoured period such as this. The Nikkor 50mm 1.2 Ais was lauded as the fastest  ever to be made by said folk. For the poorer subjects of the kingdom whose unfortunate station in life had yet to surpass that of humble caretaker to the one point four, a terrible storm of doubt and confusion rained down for twenty seven long, hard years.

 Ok, enough of that prose, down to brass tacks. I never really feel comfortable in knowing that there’s a faster lens than the one I already have from the same manufacturer. This is the very making of the terrible ‘faster=better’ stupidity disease that affects many photographers without good reason.  This often defies logic as faster lenses can have not insignificant trade-offs across the full aperture range and are invariably much more dangerous to one’s financial health. Regular readers might recall that I have already touched upon the perils of illogical fast glass lust in another recent blog post. In the case of my Nikon lens collection over the years, I had eventually whittled it down from more than twenty-five F-Mount lenses in the past fifteen or so years to just three and all of them manual focus (Ais) older designs. In this mount last year, I only owned the 28mm f2, the 50mm f1.4 and the venerable 105mm 2.5. I had been lucky enough to get all three copies from late production runs in the early 2000’s with full boxes and papers in mint condition at good prices. It just took a little patience.  The first and the last usually receive high praise across the board and are generally recognized as belonging to what is perhaps best referred to as the ‘five-star legacy glass’ fold. I know some prefer the 2.8 in 28mm but I’ve had both and find that on black and white film at least, there’s just something ridiculously good about the f2. It’s a real star and packs some serious potential as a street and walkabout lens, that’s the one I kept. From the first time I saw portraits from the 105, I knew that I would never, ever sell this lens. It has to be one of the best deals in photography.  It’s worth owning a Nikon mount camera just to shoot this lens. I used to be madly in love with my creamtastic 85mm 1.4, it was part lens/part dairy product and all dream machine but for real world use, I actually prefer the 105. It’s as good as it gets optically, small and compact, easy to bring along as a second lens and has a built in hood. It’s also way cheaper. I wanted to write this without using the words ‘Afghan Girl’ but… oh well, I just did.

 So what of the middle sibling in my fold? The nifty-fifty-Nikon one plus three pennies. This seems to be a lens which is always rated as just being somehow ‘quite good’ to middling but never really seems to garner any more praise than that. I guess it doesn’t stack up against the more modern glass and that has further hurt its slightly lackluster rep in contemporaneous times. I think many people who have owned one feel like it’s perfectly serviceable yet never really anything special. Nice to have but not enough warm, fuzzy feeling is included with one in your stable. This is the first stage of the terrible disease, that slight sense that you might be somehow missing out on something. The blurring of the line between want and need typically starts somewhere around here, many of us have been there. Enter the 1.2, it’s got quite a cult following in certain circles and the extra bit of speed and unusual size and shape can lead you to think that you simply must trade up.  The higher price tag only seems to confirm your growing sense that it must somehow deserve its gravitas in the world of high priced goods, sometimes the price tag is part of the product itself.

 After many a year of doing this dance on and off every few months in my head, I finally caved in and picked a used one up from a local dealer. Where I live, they are nearly three times the price of the 1.4 if boxed and in mint condition. Depending on where you live and what dealer you talk to, you might still be able to buy one brand new in a box. I did something that I don’t normally do at this point, I didn’t trade in or sell of the old model at once, but kept it to one side. This is unusual for me as I normally feel that I have to move something out when I acquire a new arrival. At first, I was quite enthralled with the new charmer, it has the usual incredible Nikkor manual quality and feel, there’s a reassuring heft to it. I honestly think I like the way these lenses are built perhaps more than any other, certainly as much as the brass Leica stuff of the mid-twentieth century.

 It’s a seven element, six group older spherical design.  It has nine diaphragm blades which can assist it well in terms of pleasant out of focus background areas. Wide open and in lower light, its charms continued although the depth of field at this extreme is ultra thin and requires very deft deployment. Perhaps this is exactly what one would expect. I’ve seen some wonderfully artistic stuff done at this aperture with the 1.2 Ais all around the web by people who are better at handling and exploiting the DOF than I am. A lot of them seem to own this lens specifically for such an aim. Also, when wide open the effects exhibit something of what is referred to as a ‘glow’ by many, not unlike some of the older Leica lenses of the sixties and seventies when used at maximum aperture. I think from a technical standpoint, it’s more a result of spherical aberrations and a little coma but subjectively speaking, it can appear most pleasant. That’s something that is either loved or hated, you’ll have to decide if that’s something you are okay with. Stopped down a bit to around f2 I found it more useable and just about as sharp as I can imagine any lens in the world ever really being, I’m talking brand new surgeon’s scalpel kind of sharp. Very nice indeed, yes it’s surgical but not in an overly modern way.  However, for a lot of what I shoot, and in the very bright country in which I shoot it, I am often stopped way down anyway. Much as I hate to admit it, I don’t really need an ultra low-light weapon all that often. I liked how it does colour but I don’t shoot that much of it in all honesty, and call me a philistine but on black and white film it certainly didn’t look any better than the 1.4 to my eyes.  Additionally, when stopped down to f8 or f11 sort of ranges, I think I again prefer the 1.4. The 1.2 also felt a little heavier and less balanced on my smaller bodies (FM3A and FE2), not a massive weight or anything but compared to the 1.4 it was a more awkward package overall to carry and deploy. This was no great deal breaker per se but I think it warrants mentioning and was something that I hadn’t really expected.

 Then I compared negs and prints to a lot of the stuff I had shot last year on the same cameras and film but using the 1.4. Although it is often chastised for being soft wide open, I actually quite like the way that softness looks. It is a seven element, six-group lens also of an old design.  Its diaphragm is two blades less at seven in total, I like the later model ones for the newer coatings but this is entirely subjective opinion. I also like the way that when used on Tri-x, sunlight and backlit outlines around the edges of people take on a very nice older 60’s kind of look. Not unlike the older Leica glass that I shoot with. I think it’s important when reading around the web to take people’s input onboard but also to actually look at what your work looks like with the lens and make comparisons based on that for your own personal circumstance. The internet tells me that the 1.4 is a fairly good lens but I really think it’s a great lens and I like the way that a lot of its technical ‘shortcomings’ look on my film. After doing a lot of side by side work between the two lenses over the following month, I eventually decided to return the 1.2 to my dealer who was happy to take it back for a very small fee (check out my ‘Ultimate Photographer’s Guide to Bangkok by clicking on the banner at the top of the page for a suggestive list of friendly places to buy and sell camera gear in Thailand). I think it was  just a little bit too fussy and somehow overly ‘specialist’ for my tastes and application. I think a bigger part of the problem is that with a brand like Nikon, even the expensive glass is only typically a fraction of what you would pay for Leica optics and as a keen M shooter, it seems almost deceptively reasonable in comparison. This is not always a good thing though as it makes it too easy to act upon said lens lust. In comparison, for my M, I would never really dream of casually chopping in my ‘Cron for a faster version if I were perfectly happy with it just ‘to see what it’s like’. In Leicaland that would mean the suffix of ‘Lux and suffering mo’ bucks. And if I had a ‘Lux right now I would certainly never seriously entertain the idea of chopping it in for a huge and second mortgage facilitating Nocti either!

 My conclusion: Happiness in photography, as in life, might not be found in having what you want rather in simply wanting what you already have. This applies to lenses superbly and really needs writing down on a post-it note to be stuck on to either my computer monitor or my credit card, or perhaps both.

 What in the Dickens was I ever thinking? The 50mm 1.4 Ais, It is a far, far better lens that I shoot than I have ever said, the far, far better rest are better left unsaid.  

CCP

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Prelude to a Miss, Stopping Those Bangkok Shots from Getting Away

To love shooting street, candid or any  ‘as it happens’ photography in Bangkok is to love a losing game.  As cities go, the sheer number of things happening before you simultaneously is at times just hard to comprehend, let alone keep up with. This seems to be the case much more so than in many other of the world’s cities that I have been in. Those who have tried to tame it before their lens know exactly what I mean. Bangkok is a wild tropical animal, restless and risky at night, remaining perilous and unpredictable by day. She is not easy to approach, can punish you without warning for your contact with her she and eats her young.

 I want you to get more of the shots that you want in this environment, I want you to score with a higher success rate and feel that you are making progress in your photography in Bangkok. It’s tricky to be so focused on your subject spotting, planning the shot and then making it work whilst also not getting run over, hassled by touts or pickpocketed by somebody whose gender is hard to pinpoint. Let’s try though, let’s get better. I‘m writing this because I truly want to help, I mean this sincerely.  Down to business,  in Bangkok street work in general, one needs to be uber-familiar with ones equipment at all times. We’ve all heard the usual clichés about the camera ‘being an extension of your arm’ or ‘it just gets out of the way and lets me shoot’ but these are borne out of the truths about being able to work very fast and smoothly against those fleeting moments we all encounter that are masters of escapism.  If we are to catch them, we have to be on point.  A good litmus test to find out where you rank is to see how you can set up and handle your camera for a shot without looking at the camera itself and working by feel alone. This may seems like a request somewhat akin to any cheesy eighties action movie with a martial arts theme. The restless and impatient young apprentice turns his nose up at having to endlessly repeat such a seemingly banal and humdrum menial task and can’t understand why the wise old master (yeah right) refuses to teach him anything else until he has perfected it. The hidden relevance of mastering the aforementioned chore suddenly becomes all too obvious in some grand final scene whereby the hitherto innocuous skillset now becomes the key to unlocking all conquering power against a formidable challenge. If you haven’t seen the link between that and success in street/candid photography in public yet, go back and read that last bit again.

 I repeat, know thy camera well, by hand and touch. This is easier for manual camera shooters on film, Leica Ms, Nikon FM / FE’s, Olympus and Pentax SLR’s of the same era, these are all easy cameras for this exercise. You are not exempt if you shoot digital, set up the menus in such a way so that they are ready for street and practice using your hands only to push the right knobs and buttons, and turn the right rings correctly to get you ready for street work. So as to avoid charges of elitism, I shall avoid giving the run down for a Leica M body and concentrate here on the generic film SLR body type, but honestly much of this could be applied to a whole smorgasbord of modern digital cameras.  Pick the camera up; rotate the lens all the way to one side, and then back all the way to the other, how many turns from lock to lock? Hopefully, you have some focus markings and some DoF markings on there too.  How far do you have to turn it back from one of the sides to get to a spot that is familiar to you for shooting street? For me I like to be at around two metres and I know almost exactly how far to rotate my 28mm f2 Nikkor to get me at the two-metre mark. I can do it ten times without looking at it and get it almost perfect nine times. The other time, I would still have been close enough. How many clicks for the f-stops does this lens have? Again, stop it right down, or open it right up, go to one extreme or the other and count how many clicks you need to rotate it before you find yourself at a good street aperture, that might well be say, f8. Again, on my Nikkor 28mm (and 35mm lenses on other bodies and brands) I can do this without thinking about it. I can pick up the camera, not look at it and move it to be at f8, and bang on focus at two-metres dead ahead.  Practicing this is free and incredibly effective. All one needs to do is sit at home in any room in a comfortable position and mess up all of the controls on your camera, put it down. Then pick it up back up again and see how quickly you can get your camera back into the optimum street ready condition that you prefer without looking at it. With practice it soon becomes very quick and natural. Next step is understanding depth of field in and how to make it work for you (not against you) in shooting publicly in fast moving situations. I like to work at ISO 400 or thereabouts. I won’t include the full theory of depth-of-field here (Google depth of field calculator) but at that ISO, and with my 28mm example lens stopped down to f8-f11, I find myself not only having the  subject at exactly two-metres in focus, but also anything from one metre in front of them all the way out to nearly five metres behind them will also likely be acceptably in focus too. This is a great way to work in these situations. It’s also better than relying on modern auto focus systems to focus on the right thing, they sometimes get it wrong as only you really know what your intended goal is. Set your camera to manual focus. Don’t leave it to chance. Assuming you are still sat in that same comfortable spot fondling the camera, here is the next step of your training:  Now look around the room at large objects, preferably those with straight vertical lines. Estimate how far away you think they are, using your preferred unit of measurement, feet or metres.  If you see the leg of a table that you think is two metres away, try turning the barrel of the lens to that distance (without looking at the camera) and then bring the camera to your eye. If it’s a typical split prism SLR kind of finder, you will see the subject appears correct in the finder if your guess was accurate. If not, it might be split in two and need further refining adjustment. It is also possible to do this with many different kinds of smaller digital cameras but you’ll have to consult the manual to find the best approach on a case-by-case basis. It’s amazing how quickly you can get good at it, it’s most satisfying after a while. Once you’ve got a solid feel for your favourite set distance, it then becomes really easy to over or under compensate if you feel the subject is one metre or three metres away accordingly. Or you can also simply keep your camera at the two-metre mark and get used to moving yourself nearer or closer to the subject instead.  Assuming you are well versed in exposures on manual mode (something for another post perhaps), or perhaps using aperture-priority shooting, this now means that pretty much all of the technical stuff is out of the way and you can concentrate on the really important factor of composition, putting everyone and everything exactly where you want them in the frame becomes the main task and you are free to concentrate on this to the fullest. This is how I work in my humble, botched attempts at street shooting BUT this is also how so many of the grand masters of this photographic genre shot for decades to give us many of the best images of the twentieth century.  Have the camera ready to go and the framing of the shot in mind either before or at the same time as you lift the camera to your eye. If you use the same lens often enough, you’ll likely already have a pretty good idea of what the framing will look like through the finder before it’s even in your sightline…again this expediency all helps.  All of the above means that you can keep your eye on the scene rather than looking down and messing with your rig, plus because you are ready to rock and roll before the camera is at head height, it means that you won’t need to keep it there for very long at all. The less time you have the camera to your eye, the less likely your subjects are to notice you shooting them and the more natural your shots are likely to be. There’s nothing worse than having what you know is a great shot in the making ruined because you had to fiddle with the camera more than you needed to or you held it up longer than was really necessary. The subject sees you and reacts accordingly, destroying the moment forever.  Only when we think about all these things do we really see just how tough shooting anything naturally occurring on the street can be. Your shots need to be carefully, solidly constructed with precision and awareness, not hastily assembled with paper glue and indifference. This genre is made to look oh so easy by its masters but woe betide anyone who thinks that they can gingerly stroll down the street for a half hour and come back with photographic street gold. There’s a lot to be learnt and practiced if we are to be ready when the proverbial ducks start to stand in front of one another.

Shooting in Bangkok (as with any big city) might well be a game of luck, and one in which the odds are surely stacked against us, but we can do much to improve our chances. Knowing your equipment intimately, having good technique and engaging in regular practice will all help transform you from  inept neophyte to  adept in flight, ready to swoop down and seize the moment with grace. In the words of Seneca ‘ Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity’, take your shots with elation and impunity in the City of Angels . You might not be punished by the frames that you couldn’t quite make, but you will surely remember the ones you didn’t take.

 CCP

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The Best Tripod Ever (...it's not what you think)

Here in Thailand I have found the best tripod ever made for photography. It’s definitely the best I’ve ever used.  It’s light, can easily go anywhere with me and will fit on planes, trains and automobiles without fuss. It helps when using big and heavy cameras but also works surprisingly well with smaller kit too. It works well when deployed on short trips but certainly is up to the rigours of more heavy duty long-term application. It’s not made by Gitzo or Manfrotto, it’s not made of aluminium. It’s not even made of carbon-fibre.  You don’t have to be in Bangkok, chances are you’ll also easily be able to find one near you.

 One of its legs is woven of a special, timeless and precious material called ‘motivation’. This is very strong and powerful, yet is often overlooked when looking for something on which to rest one’s camera. It works wonderfully well but can often be lost or misplaced and take a long time to find again, leaving your set-up unbalanced. When lost, the biggest challenge you’ll have to overcome with this material is in recognizing the fact that it is indeed worth looking for again. Even when you know where it is, it still needs the odd polish and a touch of maintenance here and there, it’s not that resilient a material.

 Another of this wonder tripod’s legs is constructed of something perhaps equally strong as the first, it’s a common enough resource, freely available to all those who seek it. It’s called ‘exposure’. Here the word is not used in the traditional photographic sense, moreover it pertains to being exposed to the great photographs made by other people over say, the past one hundred years. This benefits your photographic pursuits greatly. The pricing of this wonderful material varies. In high-quality, pure and glossy form, it can be very expensively acquired in sizes and weights befitting storage atop a coffee table. However, casual glances at similar chunks of it can be had for (almost) nothing by way of internet research. There’s also glossy second-hand store versions of it out there waiting for you. One can even access its ultra-premium grade form in galleries all over the world. This regular, constant exposure will surely support your photography well.

 The last leg is built from something of an unknown quantity. Its exact make up and atomic weight are hard to state with any certainty. You are the one who decides on such things.  It’s a massively variable  and unstable element we shall refer to simply as ‘opportunity’.  In this instance we are talking strictly about opportunity to practice the craft rather than the opportunities that await you out there, although they are also certainly relevant. Given that enough of this resource has been seized upon and used wisely, it will surely be the last leg that helps to hold your photography (as Ashford and Simpson would have had it) solid as a rock. A lot of people find it on the weekend, but you can also scoop up whole chunks of it before or after work and even on your lunch break. A day off anywhere in the world is likely to lead to its discovery assuming the other two legs are present. You need to have some equipment with you to harvest it, at the minimum this should be one camera and a lens plus a sensor or some film.

 I’ve tried the monopod thing. It didn’t work for me. Supporting my work with just a single leg consisting of pure motivation wasn’t enough, it got left in the back of my car or under a table at the local coffee house somewhere. I sometimes remembered that I used to have it and would often briefly search for it in vain. Most of the time I told myself that I didn’t need it and went out with one or two of the other legs instead. I knew something was off, but I just kept going through the motions. Sometimes I didn’t even bother at all. This situation sometimes persisted off and on for months or even a year here or there. Indeed, that is often the best way of realizing that you have lost this precious part of your tripod, indifference is a noteworthy symptom all of its own. You feel like you can’t be bothered to shoot and you don’t always realize that a negative change is afoot. Ignorance and apathy…terrible bedfellows at the best of times. What’s the definition of ignorance and apathy? I don’t know and I don’t f*&#!?g care. Another key warning sign is the selling off of kit. You might be telling yourself that you are simplifying matters and paring down stuff that you aren’t using. You find it harder to justify the unused equipment. Then one joyous day you finally discover where you left your precious motivation and no need to ‘single leg it’ any more. It pushes you towards the other two legs, the tripod is back again, fully supporting your photographic ambitions to the fullest. Now you feel the need to use that kit after all. Problem is that when you have to go out and buy it back again, you either can’t find it or soon find it’s more expensive the second time around. The only cheaper ones are on ‘that’ internet auction site, the parcel arrives, a game of Russian Roulette that can lead to angry early morning tourettes.  For those of us that have been at this game for a while, let’s at least not embarrass ourselves by pretending that this sort of thing never happens. :-)

  Exposure alone also failed me as an adequate brace, we can only stand on the shoulders of giants for so long before descending to walk our own path. I truly appreciate poring over the glossy books of photography’s true masters. It’s one of my very favourite photographic things to do outside of actually taking pictures. I also tingle at the idea of going to a gallery to see the ‘hard stuff’ in neat form hanging on the wall, waiting to show me the way. Trouble is, doing too much of this whilst not actually shooting sufficiently or being motivated can lead to a severe case of: ‘Neverbegoodenuffitis’; a terrible affliction which has proved to be surprisingly resistant to anti-biotics. Many have tried to self-medicate against this using alcohol and drugs. Anyone doubting the dangers of this very real and artistically debilitating disease need only to visit an art gallery showing the real prints of Adams or Salgado.  Alternatively, spend an evening  in bed with Garry Winongrand, Robert Frank or Eggleston… metaphorically speakingat least (though in the case of the latter it might have been a literal possibility given a very dark red room and an ‘open’ proclivity in your personal relationships...think more’ Maroon Three’ than’ Maroon Five’).

 I had also harboured high hopes for a monopod hewn frompure opportunity, but the construction of my photographic house always seemed to need something more beyond simply having the time and space in which to build it. I needed some direction and the force to push me towards it. When fully backed up with motivation and exposure, this material has great tensile strength. It’s easy enough to find everywhere but as a sole material to support my leanings?  No. Taking the chance to shoot without motivation and inspired direction is like shooting a video in public of your first attempts at Parkour to share with the internet, there’s an outside chance at coolsville but probably not going to end well. Sure, maybe you are one of those lucky few who can start off with the opportunity, walk around aimlessly and then ‘shoot your way into’ motivation. I know they exist but I’m just jealous as I also know I’m probably not one such fellow.

 Equal thirds motivation, exposure and opportunity are all I need. It occurs to me that these factors could be equally applicable to learning lots of new skills such as a sport, a martial art or a language.  To me, I see them not only as a ratio of which I must be vigilant to keep in good order but also a perfect tripod for photographic empowerment and improvement.

 CCP

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What Have I done?

This is not an evangelical preachy post, it’s just a ‘this is what I have done and this is why I have done it’ entry to the blog today. After much debate and internal struggle with myself, I have finally decided to go with just one system this year. I promise I will not use the ‘Why not simplify your equipment to improve your photography?’ mantra ANYWHERE here today, no way. Not me. Use what you like, use what works. Use what gets you the results you want, how you want and when you want. Holga, pinhole, Leica, disposable…use whatever you friggin’ like.

 Here’s how I personally got to this point: I love film (in case this were not already obvious). I love keeping busy, I love shooting and I genuinely enjoy developing my own films. I seriously love the negs I get on medium format more than anything else, including 35mm. What I don’t love is spending too long scanning and the kinds of scanners that we have available on the market today. I also don’t have the time to be fully analogue all the way through to the finished prints; this means nearly all hybrid work for me, with only the occasional sortie into a wet darkroom in the time-honoured fashion.

 I wish there were a commercially available, automatic, decent scanner for 135mm film whereby I could just set and forget, a la “Le Pakon 135’ on the market. Something that at least handles the bulk of the work. Not interested in ancient kit with dubious support, don’t want to have to run virtual box facilitated copies of Windows XP from thirteen years ago, don’t want to jury rig my main work tool and hope that the wheels don’t fall off it every time I fire it up. I know you can load up a lot of 35mm negs into some of the aftermarket carriers for various flatbeds but that’s not really my bag. The automated process is only one side of the wants list however, I’m also not that happy with the quality of 35mm scans from most of the current offerings until at least, say Epson V7XX levels or higher and that is a lot of outlay compared to the still fairly cheap prices of scanning available here in Bangkok on old Fuji Frontier era kind of kit. Alas, that means relying on random operators apathetically dabbling around scanning your negs on old kit with hit and miss results. Okay, maybe more hit than miss but still hassle plus delays only to eventually yield less than satisfactory results. It’s perhaps just the whole relying on other people thing that turns me off it too.

 Then we come to the larger world of 120. The lack of number of shots per roll is something that some people struggle with. I used to be one of them. For me, I’ve reached a point where I am fine with that. I would rather try and focus on quality over quantity when shooting and I find that cameras like Rolleiflexes and Hasselblads tend to really make you double (and triple) check everything so much that the keeper ratio can be surprisingly high once you get into the swing of things.  Besides, I think any serious shooter needs a double camera set-up (ideally comprising of two identical cameras) and thus my double Rolleiflexes give me 24 shots before a reload between them as well as offering differentiation between high or low speed, colour or black and white etc. The results are so nice to behold, I get much more of a feeling of anticipation and satisfaction from slowly pulling out a roll of freshly devved 120 off the reel than I do with 35mm. I can’t say exactly why but those who regularly shoot and dev both formats will know what I mean. There’s such an integrated work of art already encapsulated into my Rolleiflex negs held up to the light, before I have ever printed or scanned them.

 Speaking of scanning, medium format is a breeze. This is another part of the impetus towards my decision. It’s amazing to me how much easier it is for a keen hobbyist to obtain really nice results in scanning MF compared to 35mm. It’s just all so much easier when you are dealing with that increase in real estate. I’m sure LF shooters might say the same when comparing their negs to my 120 but I find medium format to be a sweet spot for my own practical purposes. Also, once you have your workflow down, it can be really quite quick to scan twelve frames to a nice standard and be done with it. This is a real bonus for me. I don’t have a scanner at home that I’m happy with in terms of 35mm results and so this means outsourcing. When I shoot MF, I can shoot, dev, scan well with regular kit, post process (and even publish) on the same day, all in-house. And, I like what I see. Granted, I don’t often follow such a feverish pace but the fact that I can do it all on my own terms and time is a great advantage to how I want to work. It’s hard to argue with the ‘self-sufficiency’ economy of this workflow (Thai based readers will know what I mean!). It seems as though not only are the results from MF better for me, but the convenience factor of the workflow is also much higher. It occurs to me that there is much irony to be found in this situation. 135mm was so successful for so long precisely because of how practical and convenient a format it was, the sweet spot with 24-36 frames on a smaller sized roll that still yielded high image quality was hard to deny. Now, when I hold up a freshly devved, long, uncut strip of 36 frames…it seems like a bit of an awkward burden, it’s not far enough down the road of practicality for me. To cross the finishing line from there either means upgrading my equipment and spending a lot longer time in front of the computer or dropping off and picking up at the local lab with fingers crossed.  In comparison, the shorter, wider roll of 120 glory appears much more ‘user-friendly’ to me.  The shots are already eagerly jumping up at me like a dog whose owner has just returned home and I know that once it’s dry, I will soon fly through the last stage after dinner and file it away into my ring binder, job done. It’s just a much more practical, useable and enjoyable option for where I am at right now.

 There are things I will miss. The larger number of frames on a roll of thirty-five are much more appropriate for street photography which is, let’s be honest, a genre based around a very low keeper rate to begin with. I also like the perspective and depth of field of 35mm, the way all those classic street shot frames of the last century appeared on the medium have almost come to define how we expect such a style to be. I shoot a variety of things in public however, more candid than street perhaps, I shan’t go any further down the sticky path of precise sub genre definition. I also find 35mm film a little easier to handle on and off the rolls in my tank, perhaps even a tad quicker, but this is hardly a big issue. There’s a greater variety of films available too of course although all my favourite films are very well represented in medium format so again not so much of a deal breaker here for me either.

 I also like the simpler approach of only having…..oh-oh, nearly went there. Must. Resist.  I find that my two Rolleis JUST squeeze into the same tiny bag that my two Nikons used to. Note the inclusion of: ‘used to’. This is the correct term for the situation as although I have regularly shot with Nikons and Leica M’s in 35mm, I have now passed them on to their respective new owners. Only the big, twin guns of MF Navarone remain to keep watch over any potential shots that may appear on the horizon of my creative seas.

 I’ll need to practice with them more too, there’s a lot more that can be done with Rolleiflexes than the casual observer might think. Sportsfindering, chest or waist level finders sneakily turned ninety degrees to steal away candids of calibre, zone-focusing, Rolleinars…all ways to increase the versatility of these fine machines.  A lovely, whole system in a nice well-machined little box. There’s a definite incognito, unthreatening vibe to an old TLR when deployed in public, basically it seems that people either don’t know or if they do know, they don’t care for some reason. I’m not saying that a Rolleiflex or Yashicamat can pull off some hitherto unknown change in the laws of physics but regular adherents to this kind of rig in public will know what I mean. You’re either met with indifference, a harmless smile or nod. Somehow that ‘old thing that you have to wind the big lever’ on isn’t anything that could threaten, discredit or shame anyone and it’s output certainly couldn’t appear on social media, could it? If only they knew. It’s a true weapon for candid work, it really is.

So, with nothing but 120 in the freezer and twin TLR’s for this geezer, I walk forward into the epoch of the Goldilocks format. Not too big, not too small but just right. Let’s see how this goes!

CCP