Saturday, May 07, 2011

Flew into Taipei a couple days ago. It was raining when I landed and it's been dreary since, but I don't mind. It's May, so as soon as the sun comes out, it'll get plenty hot plenty quick around here, so I'm not complaining if the clouds are keeping temps just warm.

I really need to change my life around here, I don't want to go back to doing just what I was doing before the trip to the States, and I think shooting more may contribute to that end. Shooting = Getting out of the apartment during daylight hours.

I already bought more color rolls for the Fisheye and I also have my brother's Nikon D80 DSLR to try to shake things up. I think maybe I stagnated with black and white film because of too much coffee and too much stress over whether a shot is worth using a frame of film.

Ironically, the D80 allows a flexibility that I've criticized about DSLRs before, which is it allows mindless shooting of endless frames, and inevitably one of those shots is going to be usable. But that might be what I need now to get over the paralysis and indecisiveness of wondering whether to take a shot or not.

But this is not about black and white, this is lomo, and I still have about 4 rolls of unposted fisheye (only 4 rolls over the whole of 2009-10! bleah.), while I dust off the fisheye 2 and see if I'm seeing anything.

Taipei overview:
December 9, 2008 - Jiankang Street and Nanjing East Road. I still consider this my neighborhood as it's within walking distance, although towards the outer range of my walking distance. 

December 17, 2008 - Freedom Plaza with the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in the distance. The whole plaza used to be dedicated to Chiang Kai-shek, but he's a controversial character and I thought it was appropriate for the government to take some of that back and dedicate the plaza to freedom and democracy. Chiang Kai-shek was a dictator and a ruthless butcher, but without him, Taiwan's current democracy might not exist.

Oh, and that's a group of Tibetan protestors at the foot of the gate, lobbying Taiwan to protect Tibetan refugees who have escaped from mainland Chinese repression. 

Needless to say, this construction is all complete now. The riverside bikeway on the lower left is complete and open, and the bridge on the middle right -- I forget if that's what they were tearing down or putting up. I think maybe they were putting that one up, and where I was standing was the bridge that eventually came down to improve traffic flow over the Keelung River.

Rock U (Kara)

6 comments:

joyce said...

it drives me nuts, W takes hundreds of pics for that ONE good one. unfortunately he's too busy with work to go thru the pics to find the ONE. and he shoots in raw, and the software to view it is only on his computer. so we have 1000's of pics that haven't even been looked at!!!! and this is on his new camera that he got for xmas (canon 7D)! it's annoying. :P

koji said...

See?!! and that's the tip of the iceberg regarding my peeves about the digital medium. it potentially leads people down a path of mindlessness. But I'm not saying that about you guys!! I'm just saying in general that some people are led down that path.

On the other hand, imagine if you don't view those photos for years and years, and then you come across them and recall the memories, that can be pretty awesome. It's like a time capsule.

joyce said...

haha, we actually have become mindless, i blame it on kids. :P but see, i'm really impatient, which is why i'm not a photographer. i get the ONE shot, on the first try, and that's it, good enough!!! but you're right, it's already like that with our videos! when we first got our videocam, we got a little carried away, and we just recently found soooo many videos (of R basically doing nothing, afterall he was like 3 months old). but it was funny to watch (as i kept calling him "mr. whiny-butt, i think i should probably not show these to him). our only problem now is finding a way to store all this media!!! and back it up. ugh.

koji said...

I think parents are forgiven any accusation of mindlessness. You're mindful in different ways. You're differently minded.

Yea, definitely don't show him and surprise him with the footage at his wedding! Bam.

Do you mean the amount of storage or the method of storage? I've settled on a method of storing things by year and then subdividing depending on how much photos or video I have. And every file is saved with a standard yyyymmdd tttt file name. That also makes sure everything is sequential. I start getting a lot of subfolders, but since it's like a flow chart, it works pretty well.

joyce said...

i mean the amount of storage. we have servers in our basement just for all our media, and they're starting to fill up quick. HD videos aren't small, neither are raw pics! and we have a similar subfoldering system. but when you take so many pics and video, it's hard to keep up sometimes.

koji said...

I know nothing about that. I was going to joke about "your servers", but apparently you really have servers!!

My brother doesn't understand how I can live with a 6-year-old laptop that can't handle HD. I'm like, "what's HD?".