Seoul is a city that, for some reason or another, I had never really given much thought to up until recently. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I can tell you that whatever that reason was, it was wrong. Not that I would ever be so bold as to think that I’ve been everywhere I want to go and seen everything I want to see, but after going to as many amazing places as I’ve been, seeing and experiencing some of the biggest cities in the world, it’s an easy trap to fall into thinking that it’ll be near impossible to top the Tokyos, Hong Kongs, Taipeis, and Bangkoks of the world. And yet here we are. In retrospect I should have come here much sooner, although it is nice to know that I’m still able to be so pleasantly surprised by a new place. With how incredible this city turned out to be, it really ended up being a great reminder that there are still so many beautiful places out there that I have to see.

Now I took a slightly different approach to my photography on this trip. Nothing too crazy, but a sort of evolution of how I’ve been shooting on my trips over the past decade. I generally take most of my pictures on 35mm while focusing on more of a documentary-style of shooting, then make concerted efforts to get out with my medium format camera to take more ‘deliberate’ shots. Usually at night or twilight, oftentimes with my tripod, or also when shooting specific places or things which I had been planning to shoot in 120. This has worked out fairly well for me in the past, but when it came time to make prints I always looked at my 35mm shots and wished I had taken them on 120. So I decided on this trip to only shoot 120, and to try to use it for both more deliberate photography, and documentary-style stuff. Now that this trip is all said and done I have to say, I really enjoyed this more simplified philosophy to my shooting. Only time will tell, but I’ll probably be following a similar approach on my future trips.

Read More »

So this is going to be a really short post. I was booking my flight for a small trip to a location which unfortunately didn’t have any non-stop options from Boston, so I took that opportunity to book myself a flight with a long layover in Paris. I didn’t even shoot an entire roll of film here as I was only in the city for about 6 hours and just got off an overnight flight which I got zero sleep on. Most of my time was spent visiting the typical tourist spots and getting lost looking for metro stations.

Read More »

I had the opportunity recently to spend some time over in Western Europe on a business trip. Most of my time was spent in an office in Rotterdam, but I’m not one to pass up an opportunity like this, so pretty much every free second I had was spent checking out all the interesting spots I could find within a reasonable train ride. I also took some liberties in booking my flights so that I was able to bracket my work week with some fun weekends, including a 12 hour layover in Copenhagen to start off my trip.

I arrived around 6 AM after my relatively quick flight from Boston. Technically I guess it was an overnight flight, but it left Boston at 5:30 PM so I didn’t get much sleep on the plane. Luckily Copenhagen has some pretty good coffee. So I hopped on the train and headed into the city. I probably got there around 7, and with it being Saturday morning, that meant I pretty much had the entire city to myself for a few hours.

Photography-wise I decided to switch things up just a little bit. I have been shooting Kodak Portra pretty much exclusively for the past 6 or 7 years now. It’s a great film, especially for scanning and printing, but I wanted to try something different. On this trip I decided to shoot Fuji Superia film in both 200 and 800 speeds. I was very pleasantly surprised with the results and think I’ll be sticking with these films for the time being. I’m also planning on trying out some 400 speed Superia, and maybe even a couple rolls of Provia here and there.

Read More »

Taipei is the first new city I’ve been to in years. My last trip was more of a vacation than anything, as I had just revisited my two favorite cities and even stayed in a couple of the same hotels as I had previously. As fun as that was, I knew for my next trip I was in need of a bit more adventure.

Now Taipei is a city that’s always intrigued me. I never had a really good idea of what it was like. With a place like Tokyo or Hong Kong, there’s a fair bit of popular media I can draw from, with movies like Lost in Translation, Enter the Void, any of Wong Kar-wai’s films, and some fairly prominent photographers making their careers shooting in them. But Taipei was always a mystery to me. I figured this to be a good thing, as it would allow me to go in with a fresh set of eyes.

Read More »

Four years. It had been four long years since I last left the country. I sort of went into why in my last post, but the short of it is that the travel bug had just inexplicably left me. It didn’t stay gone for too long though, fortunately, and I just got back from a 2 1/2 week trip to Hong Kong and Tokyo. Sort of a re-tracing of a portion of my 2012 trip, mostly to focus on some photography and just spend time hanging out in the two coolest cities I’ve ever been to.

On this trip I brought three cameras with me; two film and one digital. The film cameras I brought were essentially the same ones I brought on my last trip to these two cities. My Fuji GS645S medium format rangefinder with its built-in 60mm f/4 lens was used sparingly (mostly for nighttime tripod photography), and my Minolta XG-M (which I had actually purchased at a used camera market in Hong Kong back in 2012 after the shutter died on my X-570 in Bangkok) with its 50mm f/1.2, which I regrettably didn’t use at all this time in Hong Kong, but was my workhorse in Tokyo. My third camera, the digital, is a Ricoh GR I’ve found myself shooting with more and more, as it’s just so convenient since it fits right in my pants pocket and is with me pretty much wherever I go. Not to mention the fantastic results it produces. Dare I say they’re almost film-like.

Read More »