IG Monthly Best - August 2021

Home, Memories, Kindness, and Denial

Amongst the gears I own, there are many ones that are optically superior and more convenient than my Solina Vario which has the inferior Color Agnar lens, but I do feel the responsibility to take it outside to shoot once in a while. Perhaps the camera really was showing its age, when the unreliable shutter speed end up overexposing most of the shots in this roll of Kodak ColorPlus 200. For an overexposed ColorPlus shot this one is quite saturated and the scene happens to contain all of the primary colors. Perhaps that's why this photo had received so many likes on Instagram.

This photo had been sitting in my collection since November 2020, when it was getting cooler but the sun was still very bright. Emerging from the Fortress Hill MTR station, the first thing one can see are the tall last-century architectures along the King's road. These buildings have rather unimpressive exterior, but owners could have decorated the interior all luxiously. As opposed to the emerging trend of smaller, more affordable housing with less than 300 sqft in area, these older buildings are definitely larger and while still being affordable.

Hong Kong is crowned with being the city with the least affordable housing in the world. For people earning top salaries, a reasonably big property located near the city center (and this is a small city) is still a constant struggle. As my Indian peer told me, in our financial situation we could have bought several mansions in India already. Of course, not apple to apple comparision, just food for thought in this game of real estate hunt, are we to gain from it, and whether the gain worth the cost.

When no vacation due to the pandemic, go staycation. I may be strangely insistent on using old crappy cameras that are older than my parents, but when it's party time I use the right party camera. My Olympus Mju Zoom Deluxe was something my aunt dug out from the pile of clutter. It happens to only have small spots of fungus on both the front and back of the lens which apparently has no impact on the image quality. This shot was taken using the Mju and Kodak Gold 200, a gift from the eBay seller who sold me the Agfa Optima 1535. Well, it does its job just fine. Slight overexposed, thanks to the scorching, harsh sunlight of early summer. Global warming is real.

We picked the middle of the week to a staycation in Cheung Chau, an island 30-50m away from Hong Kong Island on ferry. The day was terribly hot, 35°C I remember. Sunlight shining on our exposed skins felt like directly touching flames on a gas stove. Even so, we walked around, as there are street food and shops to visit in Cheung Chau. After having fishball, tekamki, we sat down to have some osmanthus cake. The wall in this shot is right next to where we sat, and we immediately recognized what these mean. These are not the remainders of tasteless commerical posters, but a reminder of scars left on Hong Kong people.

Like the wall, once that something had occupied a space, no matter how hard you try to remove, there are always some reminders left. In the form of teared papers, written messages, empty placeholders, and so on. One day, the wall will be demonished, all reminders are going to fade into history. The way we romantize an historical event is like how we romantize a bad break up—such and such was not what happened, but what we thought happened. There is no truth, and no closure, only Precious Memories.

The more I use AGAT 18K the more I realized the framing can become a trouble where the lens and viewfinders are serveral centimeters apart, as for all view/range finder cameras. In fact all my film cameras, except the FED3 and FED5 I don't have any lens for, are view/range finders. Say for this shot, I aligned the circles perfectly in the finder, and because the lens is actually to the upper right of the finder, this photo came out shifted. Not that I wasn't aware of that, as I later corrected this difference in another shot which gives the originally intended result. With an SLR I could've pulled this off easily, with a less portable, stealthy camera body.

AGAT 18K has a f/2.8 lens, though I rarely open it up this wide for it's depth of field gets too shallow it becomse difficult to nail the focus. And when I do, like this shot, it did not fail to impress. The one piece of leaf stuck on the circle is clearly visible, whereas the circle on foreground and the stretching lady on the background are nicely blurred, inviting the viewer to look at the leaf, where it's the subject and perhaps most interesting item in this shot.

All adults must've had made some big mistakes in their not-so-short lives so far. Human instinctively have a critical voice in their mind constantly reminding them of their failures, which gets irritating and demoralizing over time. A past mistake made years ago still haunts you, even if it's material effects has weared off long ago, and people have stopped talking about it. The critical voice however, clings onto it, turns it immortal. The situation has long passed, a voice cannot possibly change anything, yet it refuses to let go.

To be kind to self is to realize that we are made by our failures more than we are made by our successes. Every time a feedback, such as failure or success, adds to ourselves like dropping coins into piggy bank, there's always a net gain, whether the amount is big or small. The voice is stopping us from making that deposite, to accept failure and move on. It's not the external situation that we should (or could) reconcile with, but the voice inside, that needs to be tamed, by being kind to ourselves. Then, the coin is deposited, and we are one step closer to completion.

At first I was unhappy about what came out of my first roll of Kodak Vision3 250D. The marketing machine of IG praised it to have the "cinematic feel" right out of the box when it's nowhere near the truth. The original scan that came out has pale colors and low contrasts, resulting in very flat image. Even ColorPlus would have performed better as I thought to myself. I was wrong, however, for this outcome is what 250D was intended to achieve and it did. See, a cinematic look is whatever you make it, some curves to tune to have bit more bluish low light, or excessive highlight, etc. What 250D offers is the latitude to do that, and it's up to the photographer to post-process it to their likings.

After talking to a friend who's looking to start to start-up on a day off, I walked from Sheung Wan towards Sai Wan Pier along the promenade. At that time, the pier was still open and people were behaving themselves. Just outside a public toilet I saw this pigeon lying on the ground. Despite difficult to observe from this image, there was stain of dark red matter on the ground, just next to its beak. It is inviting speculation, was it dead (obviously...?), death by what, what'll happen to it next?

When faced with hard facts, denial comes as the first out of the five stages of grief. The pigeon wasn't dead, it was merely having an afternoon nap, despite the fact. And eventually we move past the denial, and eventually come to acceptance, of the pigeon's death, and death to something dear to us. That's how we get to live on.