sidemirrorshooting

well, not really, entirely true. But here’s another surprise. I thought I got the last laugh in this but guess what Bai did.

ever since bai introduced me to e(vil)Bay, he had his heart set on the Cosina Cx-2. What the heck is it anyway? Well, the whole LC-A, CX-2 war began when the elitist lomographers and the not-so waged war against the Original, mother-of-all lomo cam, which everybody thought was the LC-A to the actual Cosina Cx-2, which LC-A copied off. Bai, whom I believe to have bought his LC-A+ all the way from the really magnanimously expensive Lomo shop to his shame, went off searching for the Cosina (which we have privately nicknamed Kitchen since Cosina is a sounds-like Filipino term for Kitchen).

Anyway enough about the babbling. This was entitled to an almost maddening search for this rare wonder which was popping in and out of eBay almost as rarely as hailstorm in Manila which is Once every so years. Ranging from bidding prices to 150 USD (we never got it) to around 400-500 USD (THANK GOD we never got that) with such add-ons like the power winder, the flash or underwater case.

So, we’ve failed a lot of times. I woke up early too many times (like 3 in the morning) watching the damned thing slip away for me faster than I can click BID.

I saved search it just in case it pops up. I really want Bai to get it.

Well he did. And he didn’t tell me.

There was a Cosina Cx-2 up for bidding a couple of weeks ago. I watched the item and just waited to see how it played. Minutes afer the bid ended I had an alert from my GMail telling that it’s nearly over. I just wanted to see how much it went up before it got sold.

Well, it was a steal at 172 dollars. I wonder who got it…

Winner : kaotep

WHUATDA?!

I was feeling jumpy and giddy, we have a kitchen! :D Bai didn’t probably tell me because he wants it to be a surprise :).

So okay, I waited around 2 weeks (tops) until I told him that I know something :), because he was selling his LC-A, I told him about the Kitchen. I told him that I saw he won and I’m happy we’re getting one.

On the day he got the stuff from JAC, he told me over Y!M when I was at work.

Bai, the kitchen is here, actually they’re two of them. One is for you :X

WHUATDA?!

I wasn’t expecting that. I totally wasn’t, all I can do in front of the monitor back then was look at the screen with a perpetual grin slapped on my face.

He cleaned it over the weekend and gave it to me all shiny and new last Monday. I really love him. With or without the Cosina. He’s just the greatest.

So that’s my Cosina Cx-2 you’re seeing up there, which I think beats the LC-A by a mile not because I am a biased fool who is against lomography (on the contrary), but I do eye quality when I see one.

Do wait for the output of the takes. :)

Edye is one of my favorite visitors and photobloggers from the Web. She has been in hiatus for quite sometime now and I miss her entries in both my guestbook and in her blog : in media res.

Anyway. One day she hollered over in my e-mail/guestbook asking about my shipping address… curiously I gave her Bai’s Office Address since I will be moving offices in a couple of weeks (this was around April). And say to wait for a package for some stuff she’s going to bring over, just because. She said, do wait for it 6-8 days.

I’m officially bonking the Philippine Post’s heads for it’s incompetence in sending package notices.

June 4 rolled along and Bai said he’s going to head to the Post Office. Naturally me being curious on what an actual Post Office looks like asked if I can join him. He said I should behave because I get excited when we have packages.

Thinking it was Sir Jo’s Horizon good as new (because it really is new :P) I was surprised he was carrying 3 parcel notices. 2 were for him and 1 was for me c/o him!

It has arrived!

While he did what he had to do I was moving around the post office, checking out the current stamps the counters and basically the marble flooring, the drab furniture, the peeling paint and the faded marble counter tops. I saw the Post Office Customs Guy slit open the package for me to check whats in the box. Inside the orange “Invoice” pouch was a letter and from my view (I was a bit far from the opening shenanigans) I saw some boxes and a roll of Fujichrome tungsten (haha, my sharp eyes for film never failed me).

So after the long boring part, Bai got the Horizon, I got my package and we headed to mcdonalds to grab a soda and to look at our goods.

So I was squealing at McDonalds. You’d know why later :) I took photos of the unboxing at the office. Even if the camera came 1 day late. Here’s the unboxing process… :) this was how I unraveled the package at McDonalds. This is a replay since Edye made it so much fun ^_^

getting excited, I saw the sign “Photographic Film…Do not x-ray”… Whoo!

letter from Edye, she told me she packed the box in layers, so I have to await for more surprises on each time I get surprised :D

Layer 1 : 2 rolls Fujichrome (1 is not in picture since I already loaded it in my Cosina :D the reusable cameras and a Purina ISO 800 disposable, and a box of 120s Fuji NPH :D

Here’s the next layer….I was wondering what she packed that time…

layer 2: hello, random fuji films :D (Superia X-tra 400s, 800, NPS 160, NPH 400, Reala 100, Chrome Tungsten 64, and a really old Neopan 400 from 1989! :D

I was already happy with the trail reals, but the last layer was the BOMB!

last one…

3rd layer : 9 rolls of provia and 1 kodak gold. Eeeeeeeeek! Provias! I’ve been wanting them for the LONGEST TiME :D :D :D!

So after hyperventilating from the silver coated rush + caffeine, I headed the office giddy and placed them on my office cabinet since it won’t fit my fridge at home anymore …

And here’s the WHOLE Shebang! :D

I would really like to thank her for the HUGE generosity in giving me such a stash. She will be one of the very few reasons why I would continue to pursue this burning passion of film photography.

To Edye : Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! :) I will surely treasure and put these babies in good use… I ♥ you.

ever since I was introduced to the wonders of wordpress, I was really pleased on its usability and ease of navigation. In fact, once wary me was opting to shift from wordpress.com to the wordpress publishing platform, all my worries disappeared when I was able to completely migrate in a span of 3 hours, plus with all the little OC-tweaking after.

which in turn grew my love and respect for the makers of this platform, with all the nifty little add-ons to give your site the needed kick.

in due to wordpress being 5, blogohblog sponsored a contest about blogging the contest. :D so what does it get you if your blog got picked among hundreds who blogged about it? A really awesome personalized theme and if your blog quality is 5 star, then expect a nice review of your site at blogohblog (which they said was a 300 dollar value o_O).

If you like your very own theme, and a chance to be even more popular. Then go join the contest and may the force be with us :D

info about the contest : here.

I was browsing this blog stat lately and I checked what is the most searched term that led people to my site. Lo and behold…

The top 1 search query that led them here is the vivitar ultra wide and slim. Oddly, I didn’t bother to write about it. Which led a very curious Nat asking about it in more detail, so I apologize for my negligence, and here’s a little take of mine on this little plastic handheld.

It comes wrapped and the some information on the Internet reads “Perfect for Gifts”. When you unwrap your “perfect gift” it comes with a brief instruction manual and the little box.

I’d like to think that people who can’t be bothered with the instruction manual goes directly to first hand sources who have actually used the vivitar. In my case, my manual was forgotten when Bai, being bai, showed me the ropes of loading, advancing and rewinding the film, which is all you really have to do with this camera, aside from the utmost importance of pressing the almightly shutter.

What is there in a Vivitar UW&S? Well, for one thing, it’s a pretty basic camera. In fact, it’s really much of the point and shoot variety. Unlike the smena 8m, It has 1 aperture and 1 shutterspeed. At F/11 and 1/125 of a second, immense amount of light is required or a high ISO film (which would go around ASA3200 for indoors? :P). Think Sun, Sun, sun. Although a sunset photo would look nice.

What’s so nifty about the Vivitar UW&S? It creates the really elusive vignettes and light leaks at a price way cheaper than LC-A. It’s not called an Ultra Wide & Slim for nothing as it captures a lengthy 22mm (longer than my 24mm lens) and small enough to fit your back pocket snugly. Or your little purse. And light enough to cast dubious looks and will prod you. Is that a real camera?

say hello to my little friend. The Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim

Yes. As a matter of fact, it is :D Even if it only has the following parts :

1. The Viewfinder
2. The Shutter
3. The Film Rewinder
4. The Film Advancer
5. And the place to hold the film.
6. The exterior to keep the whole thing together; and
7. A Camera Strap

To check what this little thing can create, Here’s the tag of vivitar ultra wide and slim throughout my site. Which I have a lot of different pictures ranging from usual color negatives to the craziest of cross-processed slides.

Click!

Enjoy your new little toy :D

This is a way of helping my photography teacher and to give thanks for his immense amount of patience and lessons he gave to me..

view project i shoot for i book .

I’m at lost for words whenever people make claims about what photography is for them.

Whilst others are the annoying fanb01s and fangur1s eager to play with their new toys and basically taking the same people-over-mountain/di-op ni yaya scene with different mediums and wondering why their pictures are too dark, too blurry, too burnt out, or just too … (insert other crappy adjective here).

Let’s talk about the revolution of the PP(post-processing) fanb01s and the persuasive purists. While one insists the dire need to crop/resize/redo/dodge/burn/brighten/contrast/hued/dave hill/saturate their photos, others claim that it should be done with the camera’s immediate settings (plus all those polarizer thingies) and post processing should be sought to a bare minimum.

To the people who think point-and-shoots aren’t real cameras. And the people who gave up on their little digital wonders and replace them with high-end bodies because they cannot capture a perfect nightshot with it. (tripod and long exposure is the answer) and they end up using the DSLR like a point and shoot and then… (see 2nd paragraph again).

The whole indian-pana*/pana-indian/indian-indian/pana-pana syndrome? Please give it a rest. The thing with that is both ends matter. The indian wants a pana. Pana will not work without the Indian. If the Indian wants to shoot safari or action, get a better plugins for the pana, if the Indian is happy with his pana, screw what everybody says… if it still works the way it should why get a better medium to prance around with? Just so you aren’t behind the times? geezus, I know someone who shoots with a 4 year old camera, and he has beautiful, beautiful, pictures :)

*pana means arrow in English

And don’t even get me started on the “lomography” business. Some live and die to be lomographers and not photographers. Their accidental-happy shots, the i couldn’t care less about the aperture/iso/shutterspeed/other stuff here. As long as the camera is cute and I get to xpro, everything is fine and dandy as a vivid, saturated blue sky day.

These and probably six thousand four hundred and fifty seven other ideas clashing about this whole hype of using a boxed object with a lens (and sometimes with a built in flash). Everybody is jumping into the bandwagon and buying/trading/ebaying the latest/oldest/greatest piece of gadget/toy to take pretty pictures with.

But in the end, what is the picture for anyway?

Now if anybody can answer the question without a doubt, with sureness in his heart and mind, is enough.

Be it the purists or the post-processors, lomographers, n00bs or experts, boy or girl, man or woman, gay or straight. If they know what they want to pursue in this field and not for the sake of bandwagoning into the next big thing, then that is how I see it as well.

Who cares if you post-process? What if you really like it that way? What if that’s your personal sense of style? Manny Librodo, Mango Red and Dave Hill all post process their photos to the point of being extreme and it’s fucking fantastic. So what also if you don’t like post-processing? If your aim is to capture purely the actual soul and essence of the subject, why bother mediating the reality?

For me, each picture I take should have some sort of meaning or story. I like stories in pictures. A visual should be an aid for something you want to say. Be it a trip or an event a portrait or a stolen moment that just feels right.

And who cares about the medium it could be the crudest of matchbox pin hole camera or a Hasselblad worth millions. If you got what you want then the photo is worth more than anything.

This is why I ramble too much about my photos sometimes (sometimes, really?) because I like stories. I like telling them. I blabber too much for my own good.

This is why I have no real field, I wish I did, maybe soon, but for now Photography for me is a beautiful way to capture even rawer emotions that I cannot truly write or say.

I thank thee *bow

Bai recently got a batch of Expired Konika Chrome 200s and of course, I had first dibs on the food. This was the official film of the 2008 NSP Beach Party as it fed a happy Canon AE-1P, Vivitar UW&S, Snapsights Underwater Cam and his Nikon FM2N.

The characteristic is somewhat odd in all slide films I have used. Unlike the elitecolor and velvia which promises instant gratification and prettifying because of the odd green-yellow/red tones. The Konika Chrome does not give such.

*gasp*!

The behavior of this film sides more closely to the actual E-6 processed look. Colors are saturated and contrast-y but if I am correct, the expiration gives it an extra amount of grain from scanning. Still don’t know if it’s the scanner’s fault but both my vivitar uw&s and canon ae-1p negs turned out very grainy.

Interested? Bai is selling these little babies (I do not normally do marketing but its for the loveee lol) if you like what you see below.

Enjoy the pics :) Everything is taken with the Konika Chrome 200s and the AE-1P :)

Oh, the grain :)

Sorry for the semi-long hiatus. I was busy preparing my final stages of exit from my current work. which sort of halted a lot of my photography .. erhm…study.

Anyhow. It’s been a month since I acquired my new-old toy. It flew all the way from New York to be greeted with open arms (and a roll of film) by me.

You probably know what I’m talking about when you are following my blog and you know the Russian symbols in my title.

I finally got my Smena/Смена 8m from Mikko. I got the slightly used one with a cute little leather pouchie and everything that the Smena has. (see mangled, photo of my smena below).

My Smena/Смена with all the nifty notes
(canon av-1 + kodak color 200)

This is what you can normally see from a smena camera. (not included in the picture is the back which has the film back,film counter, film advancer, and the film back opener.)

Now, I will try and tell you more about this little toy. This is a Lomo Camera not because it creates Vignettes, blurred effects (although you will even if you don’t want to), create those crazy colors (if you’ve been following this blog closely, you’d know its the slides’ fault and the x-processing). But most importantly it is the deadstock camera manufactured in USSR by the Lomo PLC Factory in St. Petersburg (not the repackaged ones by LSI). What makes this different from the usual stream of “Lomo” (which I will refer to any camera now used in “lomography”) Cameras is it’s unique features that behaves like an actual slr camera. I paid a bargain price of Php 1,500 (less than 40 USD). And It promises “punchy colors” and “sharp focusing” as said in the lomography shop.

Here are some of my personal experiences and lessons learned in handling the Smena. I hope that all would-be Smena mom and dads and already-have Smena babies get to learn from my blunders and triumphs. Here we go…

Of course, the day I got it, a Fuji NPS 160 was loaded immediately and we notice that the film counter was absolutely wrong. Which I was able to “correct” by the RTFM method (Read-The-Fucking-Manual).

The Fix :Before loading the film. Set the film Counter to “0″ (this can be done by turning the wheel) and once the film is loaded, and you advance the film using the winder on the back, notice that the “0″ will turn itself towards “1″ and so on (as long as you don’t turn it on your own). Problem solved. :D

The Smena is manual everything. And I will be blunt. This camera is not for people who are used to point and shoot and pray it looks good cameras. If you want to venture into the whole “lomo” and insists that everything should be made by a fortunate, happy accident, then I’m sorry to say, this camera is probably not for you. I believe to be able to use the Smena 8m to it’s highest advantage you have to know something about the following:

• Aperture
• ASA/ISO
• the power of guestimated focusing

Why only those? Because to help the helpess, LSI made shutter speeds into beautiful nifty weather symbols :D (okay, I’m still a bit on *squee* mode because of the cute little drawings). Which means the following :

• Full Bright Sun - 1/250
• Lined Sun - 1/125
• Lined Clouds - 1/60
• Clouds - 1/30
• Raincloud - 1/15 (don’t be an ass and use it in the rain :P)
• B - for bulb. Yummy Long exposures :)

long exposure with the smena :) (bai held the camera, I pressed the shutter)

For indoors/room shots, do remember to use Cloud/Raincloud :)

Focusing is also done with little people symbols (once again *insert squee sounds here*). It has a range of 1m (approx 3.2 feet) to infinity. I will discuss the focusing technique I did by using my 50mm lens in my Canon AV-1 as a basic (which is near Smena’s 40mm) I use the 50mm lens to focus (since you see it ASAP) and checked where the measure lay, and then used the nearest setting to the Smena.

What’s so beautiful about this Camera is when you hit the target dead on, the clarity is amazing. Like Senior Jollibee here.

But if you didn’t really get it, then you really don’t :D
forgetting to set the focus meter to infinity results in a crappy photo like this one.

And for the punchy colors? I guess this is what it meant :D

So everything relies on the icons, why bother with aperture… Well, to sum it quickly, aperture is the opening of the lens. bigger aperture (smaller number) equals to a bigger hole which equals to more light streaming in, a smaller aperture (a bigger number) equals to a smaller hole.

You might get the shutter speed and focus right, but a wrong aperture would result in this sort of disaster.

Here is me, in Paseo de Santa Rosa, taking a picture of the arcade wall. I set the focus to 1.5(or 2). and to the Cloud symbol (1/30) This is a picture of the wall taken with a f/16 aperture.

Even with a slower shutter speed (meaning more light comes in) it wasn’t enough.

I only realized my mistake when I checked the Aperture ring in front and noticed that the marker is pointed at from 16. So after setting it to a 4. Here’s the shot

This is what I am emphasizing that learning the aperture is important. You could forget the Aperture and just set the ASA to the speed of the film and screw Aperture altogether…but you wouldn’t want that (and this is me going into lecture mode again…:P)

So to make sure you actually shot something decent from the Smena You have to remember these easy steps.

1. Film Loaded Right ? Check!
2. Aperture/ISO/ASA set?
3. Shutter Speed in Correct “weather”
4. Focused Correctly Guestimated?
5. Shutter cocked ? (What the? Yes. you need to cock the shutter to be able to press the release button, this is my most often mistake)
6. Press the Shutter!
7. Don’t forget to rewind (or do forget to if you’re aiming for multiple exposure (just repeat steps 3,4, and 6), I keep advancing the film automatically, force of habit from the Vivitar UW&S.)

So there we have it. Another n00b-like explanation from the level 5(? not sure if I leveled up already) n00b. Here are some of my pictures from the Smena 8m. Hope you enjoyed another lengthy post by yours truly :)

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photos are taken with the smena 8m + kodak bw400cn + fuji nps 160 (expired) + kodak color 200

I noticed that I’m a sucker for reflective surfaces the same as my photographer manager friend. Although I seem to have a very close relationship with puddles.

If you remember this post, it was a wet morning and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to create beautiful mirror scenes of nature.

Canon AV-1 + DNP Centuria 200

you can create such odd and curious looking photos like this one. It was the usual Hardware Committee meeting and I had my camera around. All I did was took pictures. My notebook and pen was left behind. I remember it was the first few times I carried my film camera, everybody was still in awe. Now, it’s an old hat.

Anyway, back to the reflective surfaces. I had my Vivitar UW&S in Greenbelt and I took some reflective photos from their nifty water holders. Here’s how they turned out.

Vivitar UW&S + Kodak Profoto 100

You can look at one structure in so many different ways. This is the New World Hotel in perspective #1.

Vivitar UW&S + Kodak Profoto 100

and here’s perspective # 2. All the shapes and angles made this photo look different from the first. Even if they’re just the same subject.

And here’s the last of my reflective series from the roll. I was lucky since this particular water pond has fountains every so and so seconds…one wrong timing and I would have ripples.

VIvitar UW&S + Kodak Profoto 100

Anyway, I was pretty lucky :)

Enjoy the series!