Landscape in Traffic Mirror

 

Yongchon Village

Bushes grow tall in summer and there are blind turns and hills on the roads that go through Yongchon's fields. Thus the need for traffic mirrors to be set up in various locations.

Film

 The photographs in my last post were made on my phone after I used up the end of a roll of film. I now have the scans from that and two other rolls of film. The results were mostly disappointing, but there are a few I don't feel embarrassed to share. All were made using my Nikon F80.

Kodak Ultramax 400. There is little interesting about this sign for a rice and seasoned vegetable restaurant, but I was attracted by the strong yellow colour, the strong shadow, and the contrast between circle and rectangle.

Around Sokcho Central Market there are sidewalk vendors who sell vegetables and dried or half-dried fish. This man is a regular but I don't usually see the woman who is washing chives for him. I made this picture from inside a bus.

My wife received a teaching award at her school and it came with a bouquet of flowers. She put them on the balcony table and I took the opportunity to test out the Kodak 400's dynamic range and colours.

The new English library here in Sokcho.

A photo made so I would remember which camera I had used.

I was sheltering from the sun in this concrete pavilion when I saw the gas delivery truck coming from a distance. I composed and waited for the vehicle to complete the composition. Click. Or flap, rather - the F80's shutter is soft and quiet.

Time for a new roll of film. Kodacolor 100, which is ProImage 100 by another name. I can get both here. The film is cheap compared to something like Portra, but the quality is pretty good and I like the colours it produces. This is an irrigation canal that runs between rice fields in Yongchon Village.

This is the Yongchon CU convenience store where I usually take a break when out riding bicycle. When the weather is decent, I sit outside at the picnic tables. When it's too hot or too cold, I sit inside at one of the table and look out the window.

I rather like the curve of the dyke going off into the distance.

The Christmas Pension. Is this open all year? It seems a rather odd choice of theme considering that most people stay at pensions during the summer months. Nice reds, anyway.

Ilford XP2 Super 400 film. Good stuff that the lab scans well. More rice fields. The dog house next to the utility pole is not for an animal to live in, but to protect an irrigation pump from the rain. It's quite common to see this in farming areas.

Yeongnang Lake. The wooden poles at the bottom are for birds to perch on.

These foldable hoods are for park benches. It was a bright day so I got some nice contrast.

Back to Yongchon Village. These vines are growing up the side of a pumphouse that isn't being used anymore.

I have four more rolls of film in the fridge, but I don't know when I'll get around to using them. Getting it developed and scanned is expensive and these days digital just seems so much more convenient. But I like the film look, so who knows? Maybe I'll reserve film for those days when I get the itch for it.

 

Post-Film End of a Bicycle Ride

I used up the get-it-over-with end of a roll of Kodak ProImage 100 on a bicycle ride in the countryside this morning and, instead of putting in another roll of film and making maybe one or two more pictures, decided to switch to the Hipstamatic application on my phone.

Brunch Café 

This unusual brunch café is between the villages of Yongchon and Bongpo. Right behind me is the sea and between me and the café is an empty field. I wonder how long it will stay empty. Maybe there's something wrong with the land, otherwise developers would have torn up every flower and bush and put up ugly concrete boxes to sell coffee in by now.

Yongchon CU Convenience Store

I made my regular stop at a convenience store to take a break.

Everything I need for an hour or so of riding and rests - camera (Nikon F80 today), books of poems, and a notebook. I pay my seat fee at the convenience store by buying a small container of milk to drink.

Out of frame to the right is a former empty piece of land that now has a massive convention centre being built on it. They destroyed every living thing on that piece of earth, built an ugly concrete building, and then dug up some pine trees from somewhere else in the country and dragged them to this place to make the new eyesore look like it fits in with nature.

Farmer's Shed

It's not a pretty concrete box, but at least it's photogenic.

Yeongang Lake

Almost home. I stopped to make a picture of the lake. In the background you can see a new apartment complex going up. The former mayor relaxed the rules about building around the lake park. Again, why have trees when you can have money?

I love riding out into the countryside. It's usually relaxing, there are lots of places where you don't have to meet people and cars, and it's relatively quiet. But seeing the land being torn up for development gives me a sour taste in my mouth.

Chair

 Hipstamatic application on iPhone 6s+

Shinheung Temple Stelae

 

Shinheung Temple

I may be the only person who visits the small stelae park dedicated to monks who lived at the temple in centuries past. I never see anybody when I'm there, anyway.

Nikon Z50II, Nikkor Z DX 16-50mm f3.5-6.3 VR

Long Liners, Sokcho Harbour

 

Nikon D850 + 85mm 1.8D, Ilford Delta 400 film preset 

The boat on the right is usually at the dock by itself, but I was lucky enough to catch three tied up side-by-side. I was also lucky to get one frame where the water was calm and the reflections fairly clear. The water was full of ripples in the other pictures I made at the same time.

Imitating Stephen Shore

 I watched a video on YouTube about the photographer Stephen Shore last month. Some people say he makes interesting photos of everyday scenes and other people say he skilfully photographs the banal. I looked at a number of his pictures after watching the video and, like every wannabe artist, thought, "Well, how hard can that be?" Quite hard, as it turns out.

I took my Nikon D850 out one cloudy morning to have a go at it. I chose the D850 for the image quality and because it does 5:4 format and Shore did a lot of his work on large format cameras. Here are some of my banal photographs.

Stephen Shore photographed a lot of his meals, so I took a picture of my cereal before I left the house.

I photographed this window before and you can see it in my recent posts. But this time I included a sliver of brick sidewalk. Slightly more interesting?

A downtown clothing shop, possibly a used clothing shop. I'm not sure that jacket will ever sell, but it certainly draws attention. Looking at this picture now, I'm thinking I should trim the left side to get rid of the black line. It's a little distracting.

"Why did you take a picture of this?" asked my wife. I like the simplicity of composition and the quality of the diffused morning light. She wasn't convinced.

She did like this one. Me, too. I like the light, the simplicity, the mystery of what's on the other side of this wall, and, most of all, the fact that the middle bollard is close to but doesn't touch the photo of Sokcho Harbour.

This scene was just ten metres or so down the road from the last one.

I like the composition of this photo, but it needs something. More contrast, perhaps?

Cheongcho Lake, which is more of a harbour considering the lake is attached to the sea and it's possible for large fishing vessels to come and go. There are several sets of binoculars on this deck, but what you can see besides high-rise apartments and a fish plant I don't know.

I made this picture with the Hipstamatic application on my phone. I took the same picture on the D850, but this one had more interesting colours.

This last photo doesn't really match the others, but wood and colour are so rare in the city that I wanted to take a picture.

I'm no Stephen Shore, but it was a good exercise to go out for a morning and try photographing the city in a way I hadn't before.