Velvia 100F somehow turned the evening sky from blue to purple. Maybe it's capturing more wavelengths than what my naked eyes could see, or it's just Velvia doing its thing. Wow that burned sky just make it worth the while to setup a tripod for the Moskva-5 and shoot at 1/2s or 1s with a cable release. Looking back, I should have risked ruining a shot to overexpose by shooting into the setting sun—the one shot shat I anyway wasted elsewhere.

After weeks of overcast in February we finally got one week of good sunshine which I shot shot the hell out of. This particular shot was taken after rushing out of work and walked for an hour or so from 深井 towards 屯門公路轉車處. I arrived to see the sun setting and waited for around 20 minutes contemplating life (not really) before setting the Moskva-5 up for this shot.

I couldn't think of a better film format than medium format color positive to shoot this sunset. Just need enough money to pay for the film.

Just as my yearly resolution of 2022 says, "If you wanna do something, don't let anything stop you. The result speaks for itself in this instance, and I had a great time going on this shoot. When was the last time you felt ambitious about something?

This is really…So—Fujicolor C200 performed well producing some vibrant color and good sharpness on the Bessa R3A with the Nokton lens. I like that despite the scene is a highly dynamic one, the model's face in the shadow was well preserved, even coming with a green tint as sunlight shone through the leaf.

As mentioned in my photowalk blog about our shoot at 石龍拱, Macx (@mjcrout) accepted to act as the model. In a place full of greens, C200 became a natural choice for me. The film produced no weird white balance shift or tint that's out of order to the setting. Macx's ideation and modelling worked nicely, as I knew not how to pose or give instruction about posing. This particular shot is the result of me going too explorative to show off how tall the plants have grown since the place had been abandoned. The dot of light on his forehead was a total surprise that I only realized when the scan came not.

Being a personal friend of the model on a shoot not paid for had put weight on me psychologically. I joke about people in my street photos all the time. I know of the hilariously funny quality of some shots thm the shoot, but make even light-hearted joks sabout person, and to own a large power to "qualify" a photo via its description is somewhat against nature of my half-hearted and deadbeat playfulness that are funny only some of the times.

I guess that is what photography "transforms a subject into an object" is about as described in Roland Barthes《Camera Lucida》? And "gaining ownership of a subject" as described in Susan Sotag《On Photography》? Too much a weight, a burden for me to now see anything from a photo!

The weather had been bad throughout February. One day I couldn't help but loaded a roll of Kodak Vision3 500T into the Contina II hoping to at least do some night shoot that's less dependent on weather. The light was dimmy at the time and I wanted to capture the blue hour shortly after the sun has set. There's a slight camera shake identifiable by all dot lights appearing in an irregular 90° shifts, instead appearing as dots that they are.

The 500T surely is sensitive enough for blue hour and the white balance was spot-on giving me the feeling of a calm nightfall I wanted. The shooting of this shot wasn't as calm though.

When I scout for this shot, I saw a pair of father and daughter next to the lamp post. I knew they were leaving so I slowly deployed my tripod, hoping that they take the hint and surely they did. The daughter said "Daddy that person is photographing us" and nope, I wasn't. Right at the moment the two of them noticed me, I'd already given upon shooting them and I only wanted them gone. The candidness has been lost, and thus nothing left in them I wanted to capture.

Well that's not because they were putting on faces or blocking my camera. Rather, I felt that it voided my "control" over my shot. The "control" to shoot at a timing and an angle of my choice, despite exactly none of that manifested physically—This is something curious.

My LM-FX adapter had arrived. With this I could mount the Nokton lens onto my XT-20, expanding into the prime lens realm at little cost. I have mentioned the merits of prime lens previously and that hasn't changed. This shot captured sharply the subject and still give nice sharpness even to distant objects.

To use the adaptor simply screw that in between the lens and the camera. Focusing aid of the camera was necessary because focus markings on the lens would have been way off. Manual focus using the aid is quite easy to get used to especially at high f stops when most things are in focus. I'd say that beats auto-focusing in speed and accuracy, espcially when my auto-focusing lens got the focus wrong sometimes.

I chose this to be my personal favorite of the month because I too run, regularly, 3 times a weeks. The composition of 3 stretching runners is hilarious. Plus that was my first time using the adapter. All these elements are personally meaningful to me.