street

One Last Swig

*One Last Swig*
Fuji TX2 + JCH 400

I was in Shanghai in early January (you know, the world before…) but the weather was miserable. I shot some colour with 800 ISO film, but I felt the mood was really better suited to black and white. So I walked around the French concession with a roll of JCH400 that fit the mood nicely. I’m normally a bit stifled when shooting street, looking for alignments and clean compositions instead of just shooting interesting people. I’m also not very good at manual focusing in haste. So I was double happy about this shot which doesn’t look like my usual stuff and is sharply focused!

Lao Kids

*Lao Kids*
Fuji TX2 + Fuji Pro 400H

The smile of kids is a boon everywhere, and these kids in Luang Prabang seemed quite happy to be photographed, as kids often are (and more generally as people tend to be in South-East Asia.)

Monks in the Headlights

*Monks in the Headlights*
Fuji XT3

Every morning in Luang Prabang around 5:30 AM, processions of monks walk down the streets as locals give them sticky rice for their day’s meals. It’s quite a sight, and of course in the summer it happens at dawn. But in December, it’s still night, which meant I had to expand my bag of tricks to get some interesting shots. I didn’t want to disrupt the scene, so I used a zoom lens. I cranked up the ISO to a whopping 25600, first time ever. I’m surprised at how good and usable the results are. This silhouette shot of a young monk backlit by the headlight of a motorcycle is my favourite.

Luang Prabang


*Luang Prabang*
Fuji TX2 + Fuji Provia 100

There are many charming things about Luang Prabang in Laos, but one of the most exciting ones for me as a photographer was the prevalence of monks. They are everywhere, especially early in the morning and late afternoon, and I took many photos of the monks. This was one of the first ones, and I really like it because it shows many of the aspects I loved beyond the monks themselves : the colonial architecture, the omnipresent mopeds, and the harsh sun.

Dogtown

*Dogtown*
Ricoh GR1 + Kodak T-Max 400

Sai Kung is a seaside town North-East of Hong-Kong Island. For some reason, either there’s a lot of dog owners there, or dog owners converge there at the same time I go there. Either way, I intend to go back to do a series of nothing but dogs and dog owners. This is one of them. Interestingly, while many people aren’t too happy about being photographed in the street, if you show interest in the dog, they agree readily!

 

Waiting for the MTR

*Waiting for the MTR*
Ricoh GR1 + JCH400

You know this annoying feeling when you’re going to drop film at the lab and the one roll in your camera has only a couple of shots left ? I tend to shoot anything, and it’s virtually always crap. Well, not this time! This is one of those rolls. I think it was even shot in the Lai Chi Kok station where Camera Film Photo is located!

Sham Shui Po Life

*Sham Shui Po Life*
Ricoh GR1 + Ilford FP4+

Sham Shui Po is an area of Kowloon that feels like it has still retained much of the Hong Kong life of old. It’s busy all times of day (and night, I suspect) with street vendors of all sorts buzzing around. These guys were just setting up, I have no idea what they were selling, but it’s such a typical scene that I thought I would share it.

The Narrows


*The Narrows*
Ricoh GR1 + JCH400

One of the things that feels to me to be uniquely Hong-Kong is the narrow passages that connect the streets. Sometimes they are wide enough for small street markets to live there, but sometimes they’re just so narrow that their only function seems to be as a refuge for smokers.

Framed!

*Framed!*
Ricoh GR1 + JCH400

The light in Hong Kong can be very harsh, and JCH400 is a great film but very contrasty. So some might argue that the above shot is too contrasty with some blown highlights. And yet to me this is what Hong Kong on a bright day looks like. The woman in the temple door is just a great bonus.

Oxford in the Sun

*Oxford in the Sun*
Fuji TX2 (XPAN) + Ilford Pan F

Last summer I did a bit of mad traveling going from Bordeaux to Paris to Mâcon to Paris again, to Vienna to Lyon to Marseille to Bordeaux to London/Oxford and back to Bordeaux, most of it for work and in the space of two weeks. It was too much. When I arrived in Oxford it was brutally hot, very unusually so for Britain, but very clear as well. Just outside the train station, I saw this row of beautiful old British houses, took out the camera, and voila.