Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

Posts tagged ‘My Vancouver’

Notes for an abridged spell

1st-quarter of 2024

A few things have happened since I last saw and spoke with you.

As the calendar transitioned from 2023 to 2024, I understood I would relive in part the trauma of living through and ā€œsurvivingā€ my parentsā€™ deaths. I knew the replay in mind, body, and spirit was entirely, critically, and consciously inevitable: one, two.

After some dawdling on my part (lasting months), my sister and I finally put up for sale the family house in Chinatown/East Vancouver. We listed the house in early-January with open-house viewing mid-month. According to our realtor, about a dozen groups of people passed through for a look. We received an offer, and after minor negotiations, we accepted in February the offer on par with assessment.

Over two separate busy sessions, we had the house emptied (ā€œruthlesslyā€) of all its items, leaving behind only appliances, light-fixtures, and very old drapes. On April 3rd, I handed all of the house-keys to the buyerā€™s realtor, ending in that simple gesture almost 50 years of our familyā€™s presence within a simple but very functional 2-storey house. By the end of April 4th (ā€œdouble 4, double deathā€), BC Hydro had cut all power to the house.

ā€œGoodbye.ā€ East Vancouver, 2 Apr 2024 (iP15).

The emotional impact wasnā€™t as difficult as I had imagined, despite my inclination to self-destruction. But typing this now in a basement apartment Iā€™ve rented for a month in New Westminster, it feels a lot like Iā€™m finally closing the doors to many things to the rapidly fading past. Am I going to look back? Perhaps. It seems unkind not to, but there is a growing sense thereā€™s more ā€œout there,ā€ if I decide Iā€™m brave enough to move forward, one foot in front of the other. But I donā€™t intend on going back.

(And yet, thatā€™s what I said when I left for Toronto in 1994, never imagining my return in 2013. Funny how my eventual refusal to abandon the parents worked out after all ā€¦)

It is an enormous mixture of satisfaction and the bittersweet: a little sad itā€™s gone and out of our hands, but Iā€™m also eager now to get out of this place.

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My Fuji X70: Fujichrome Slide, Kodak Platinum 200 (XTrans2 recipes)

Above/featured: 1st Narrows, from John Lawson Pier.

My Fujifilm X70 mirrorless fixed-lens prime camera has been a big plus for photography at domestic and international locations. The built-into-camera film-simulations (e.g., Provia, Velvia) work beautifully in standard settings, but as I’ve never had a film camera, the advent of “camera recipes” to produce additional film-like settings stimulated interest in different colour or pictorial representations.

So far, I’ve tested these Fujifilm film-simulation (“film-sim”) recipes:

•   Ektachrome 100SW (saturated warm), simulating images with the Kodak colour transparency or slide films produced 1996–2002;
•   Kodachrome 64, simulating images with the Kodak colour film produced between the mid-1970s and 2009;
•   Kodacolor, “producing classic Kodak analog aesthetic closest to early-1980s Kodacolor VR200 colour film that’s been overexposed.”

( Click here for images )

My Fuji X70: Kodacolor (XTrans2 recipe)

Above/featured: After Girard: Vancouver-Strathcona, 14 Oct 2021.

The Fujifilm X70 mirrorless fixed-lens prime camera has been a real boon to my approach to photography for personal projects both domestically and internationally. To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve provided examples of X70 images made with two Fujifilm analog-film simulation (film-sim) recipes:

•   Ektachrome 100SW (saturated warm), simulating images with the Kodak colour transparency or slide films produced between 1996 to 2002;
•   Kodachrome 64, simulating images with the Kodak colour film produced between the mid-1970s and 2009.

In this post, I examine the Kodacolor film-simulation, a reproduction of which Fuji X Weekly’s Ritchie Roesch describes as “producing a classic Kodak analog aesthetic.” According to Roesch, the digital film-simulation is closest to Kodacolor VR analog color film from the early-1980s, whose ISO200 version is still available for purchase as “ColorPlus 200” (Kodacolor 200).

The following film-simulation recipe creates images similar to the look of “Kodacolor VR 200 (film) thatā€™s been overexposed.” My X70 settings are:

  • ‘Classic Chrome’ built-in film-sim
  • Dynamic Range: DR400
  • Highlight: +1 (Medium-High)
  • Shadow: +1 (Medium-High)
  • Color: -2 (Low)
  • Sharpness: 0 (Medium)
  • Noise Reduction: -2 (Low)
  • White Balance: 6300K; -3 Red, -2 Blue
  • ISO: Auto, up to 6400 for “grainy” appearance (or fixed to 1000)

The recipe above is for the X-Trans II sensor; the corresponding recipe for an updated or more recent sensor is found here. All other recipes sorted by specific sensor are found here.

The following images were made at locations throughout metropolitan Vancouver. Minor adjustments to brightness level, rotation, and geometric distortion have been applied from straight-out-of-the-camera (SOOC) to posting.

( Click here for images )

My Fuji X70: Ektachrome 100SW (XTrans2 recipe)

Above/featured:False Creek east, from Cambie Bridge – 12 Jul 2021.

A variety of film simulations in the form of recipes with different settings are applicable to Fujifilm cameras to create uniquely historical and/or vintage look to images. Fortunately, a number of recipes are available to apply onto Fuji cameras with X-Trans II sensors.

That’s where my Fuji X70 has entered the fun fray. Previously, I showed examples of images made with the Kodachrome 64 recipe, simulating images made with the Kodak analog colour film produced from the mid-1970s to its final run in 2009.

I wanted to try another film-simulation recipe: the Ektachrome 100SW (SW for ‘saturated warm’) described by Ritchie Roesch in Fuji X Weekly. Historically, the Kodak company produced the ‘Ektachrome’ line of colour transparency or slide films. From its introduction in 1996 to its termination in 2002, the ‘Ektachrome 100SW’ film with increased ISO sensitivity produced images with deeper colours and warmer colour balance.

At locations throughout metropolitan Vancouver over a period of four weeks in July and August 2021, here are images below straight-out-of-the-camera (SOOC) with the following settings:

  • ‘Velvia’ built-in film-sim
  • Dynamic Range: DR200
  • Highlight: +2 (High)
  • Shadow: +1 (Medium-High)
  • Color: -1 (Medium-Low)
  • Sharpness: 0 (Medium)
  • Noise Reduction: -2 (Low)
  • White Balance: Auto; +1 Red, -2 Blue
  • ISO: Auto up to 3200 (or fixed to 1000)

All recipes sorted by specific sensor are found here.

( Click here for images )

The Retired Draft Horse and the Last Pulled Log, Ken Lum, Kings Crossing, G and F Financial Group, Burnaby, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: “The Retired Draft Horse …”, by Ken Lum

I’m highlighting this month Chinese-Canadian artist Ken Lum: born and raised in the western Canadian city of Vancouver; he began studying chemistry at university before switching completely to art. Today, not only does he continue to make art, but he also comments about the contemporary and historical nature of art and about how art and society continuously shapes and informs each other. All of Lum’s pieces featured this month are located outdoors and freely accessible to the public at zero cost.

In 2020, Lum completed a sculptural work commissioned by Cressey Properties for its development in the city of Burnaby. “The Retired Draft Horse and the Last Pulled Log” resides at Kings Crossing at the intersection of Kingsway and Edmonds. Lum wrote in his proposal:

“… about a draught horse that is no longer called to work.The horse is a Clydesdale or a Persheron, the largest of draught horses that were commonly employed in British Columbia in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries. The log with chains on the Edmonds street site is meant to be in dialogue with the horse sculpture at the primary site of Kingsway and Edmonds.The larger than life size but not greatly larger than life sized horse surveys the modernity that has transpired since its working days in Burnaby and acts a sentinel of both the past and the future of the site.ā€

I made the photo above on 16 May 2021 with a Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime (18.5/28mm). This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-llo.