After buying the Bessa R3A at the start of 2022, I haven't had much chance to use it because I have too many cameras and the weather haven't been good in late January and throughout February. There were sunny time—on working days. On early February I had a chance to take Bessa R3A out to shoot with the Fujicolor C200.

I rarely use C200. It's a budget film like Kodak ColorPlus but now C200 is very expensive, even more expensive than UltraMax and closing in to Portra 160. The characteristics of C200 is the color rendition of green and red, which you are able to see from this shot. In fact, while many put the focus on the "Fuji green", the punchy red from this otherwise "cold" (compared to ColorPlus) is impressive. The same is more obvious in the Personal Best of the month at the bottom of this post.

The cloudy days on January and February 2022 have been depressing. While I had the chance, I took 2 vacation days right after the Chinese New Year holiday. At the beginning of the day, I was worried about the cold and cloudy day. After getting my fortune read and eating Sushiro in Wong Tai Sin, the sky turned sunny.

My friend and I walked from Ma On Shan MTR all the way to Tai Wai MTR, a 9.5km journey. The sunshine provided me with the best setting for photography and walking, which in turns warmed up both my mind and body.

It's a great feeling seeing sunshine on a day I can go shoot. I cannot imagine living in northern Europe where overall sunshine duration is way less than than Hong Kong. If anything, I do enjoy snowy landscape.

Anyway, we may be in the darkest moment of quite some time, still we should try to be hopeful—when there comes the light it'll be the best feeling in the world.

My chase for finer grain and sharper lens began after Agfa Isoly 100. This is actually an old image from 2020 taken with the Isoly 100, with I think Kodak ColorPlus or Kodak Gold. Lens with proper coating wouldn't have resulted in such a wide haze. Even low quality toy cameras is capable of creating good image if you got the mood right.

In my monthly best writings, I rarely talk about the caption. This time 春花若落—spring flowers about to wither, 春愁若樂—I pretend to the happy among the spring sorrow. This is a Chinese word play/pun.

We capture moments that fades every instant. The loss is constantly experienced. And amongst the sorrow of this loss, there's always another moment (redemption) to come, for as long as we have camera in hand, a curious mind to explore, and a healthy body to traverse, we will eventually encounter another great moment. For now, we pretend to be happy.

To be honest, no much to talk about this one. At low aperture stop the Nokton 40mm f1.2 is very sharp, even on budget film Fujicolor C200. Grain aside, observe that the building at the back and the signs all appearing sharp.

Taken on the same day where we have sunshines after almost 2 weeks of cloudy weather. Under sunlight, everything seems interesting, even a random bike lane with a random uncle. If anything, perhaps the bluish buildings at the back and the yellowish road on the front is creating a pleasant color combination, like the kind that people like to post these days.

Of course, the posting of this image pre-dates that.

And it seems like in the winter plus shadow of COVID-19, people have a hightened likings to images of sunshines. In fact, all of the February's bests are photos of sunlight.

The color given by C200 is usually more natural than the ColorPlus, perhaps because the warmth gets overboard on ColorPlus (see this month's best #2). When it comes to green and red I'd choose C200 over ColorPlus every day. Sadly, C200 price hike has brought beyond the budget film category. If Fujifilm continues to discontinue *ahem* their lines of film, the world would be a worse please as all we'll be left with is (mostly) Kodak. A diverse selection of film stocks is an important aspect of this art.

Sunlight is the recurring theme of this month's best photos. I feel that after the groomy month of staying home and uncontrollable COVID-19 situation in Hong Kong, people are very stressed and crave outdoor sunshine more intensely.

I pick this as my monthly personal best because of the same reason. The flower is the analogy of all of us. We are all trying to see the "light" but we can't get any closer due to circumstances, we cannot get more sunlight. But as repeatedly iterated in this month's bests, we should not stop being hopeful. Eventually at some point the sun will shine directly over the flower. We need to only wait, patiently and hopefully.