Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

Posts tagged ‘Vancouver’

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 )

My Fuji X70: Kodachrome64 (XTrans2 recipe)

Above/featured: South portal, Lions Gate Bridge – 25 Jun 2021.

I wrote about how the Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime has been great for my photography. Fujifim prides itself on good to faithful reproductions of film simulations (film-sims). For the most part, I’ve used the default or “Standard” setting, equivalent to the “Provia” film-sim which is one of 11 film-sims built into the X70.

I learned about other film-sims, particularly those applicable to the older X-Trans II sensor that’s in my X70 camera. I’ve been interested in digital reproductions of “old” colour slide film, and seeing how images over a variety of subject matter appear with a film-sim that looks a little more like “old school film”. Ritchie Roesch describes in Fuji X Weekly the differences between the Kodachrome II and Kodachrome 64 film-sims; the former resembling the look of Kodak film from the 1960s to the mid-1970s and the latter echoing the final version of the film-type from the mid-1970s to 2009. Roesch provides additional historical context to the development of Kodachrome film here.

Here I’ve used the Kodachrome 64 film-sim recipe with the following settings:

  • ‘Classic Chrome’ built-in film-sim
  • Dynamic Range: DR400
  • Highlight: +2 (High)
  • Shadow: +1 (Medium-High)
  • Color: 0 (Medium)
  • Sharpness: 0 (Medium)
  • Noise Reduction: -2 (Low)
  • White Balance: Daylight; 0 Red, -3 Blue
  • ISO: Auto up to 3200 (or fixed to 1000)

All recipes sorted by specific sensor are found here.

( Click here for images )

Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

Vancouver: Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School

In late-May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the discovery of 215 children buried in a mass grave at a former residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia; ground-penetrating radar was used to locate the remains.

During a period of 160 years, the Government of Canada in concert with churches constructed residential schools in a state-sponsored process of “aggressive assimilation” to make children of Indigenous people “less aboriginal and more white” with instruction in English and Christianity in order to erase the children’s traditions and cultural ties.

More than 150-thousand children were sent to some 130 residential schools across Canada between 1830s and the 1990s. Forcibly removed from their homes and parents, children of Indigenous peoples were forced into the schools where they faced neglect and physical and sexual abuse. Physical records indicate a total of over 4000 children deaths; the actual number is very likely much higher. Many children were not buried properly, parents were not notified about what happened to their children: many children who were forced into residential schools never returned home. For years, survivors have told their stories about what happened inside those schools: there is every expectation more mass graves and more children will be found.

The systematic removal of indigenous children from their families disrupted, divided, and destroyed living generations of indigenous families, robbing people of their respective culture and language and the wealth of lived experiences shared between generations. According to the terms and definitions laid out in the 1948 United Nations’ Convention, Canada committed genocide against their Indigenous Peoples. The destructive effects of white colonialism upon Indigenous Peoples in the country is not only historical but continues today with inequity, intransigence, obstruction and obfuscation, and injustice.

A makeshift memorial was quickly created at the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery at Robson Square. It’s worth noting the Art Gallery is presently housed in the former provincial court house which opened in 1911 and would have served as a “legal” instrument of white- and settler-colonialism. That this National Historic Site is the location of an improvised tribute to the loss of life and dignity caused by state-sponsored acts of genocide is an enormous juxtaposition.

June is National Indigenous History Month in Canada.

Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com
Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

“Are we human?”

Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com
Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

“Bring our children home.”

Memorial for the Kamloops Residential School, Robson Square, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

As a resident of Vancouver, I’m a guest on unceded traditional territory and land of the Coast Salish First Nations: Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). I made all images above on 1 June 2021 with a Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-l2C.

This is the place where I died again

The mind’s eye slowly emerges, hanging over my shoulder for hours after the official declaration at 850pm.

With the nurses’ gentle request, I comply without a word, and I sign the paperwork.

I walk back into the hospital room where she lies. The only sounds are from her neighbour, another patient in another bed, their laboured breathing as sign of life.

I gaze out the window to the nighttime lights of the city. From a great height, I cannot see individuals, but I see them in motion on the streets, and alive in the lights of their houses.

At her bedside, I hold her hand, cool to the touch. I place my other hand on her forehead: there’s a little warmth as I smooth her skin with my thumb. Her eyes are closed, but there’s no breath or acknowledgement. When I close my eyes, the dream doesn’t go away, and ashes begin to fall. I lean down next to her ear, and whisper quiet words at the close.

I palm her cheek one final time, as I’ve done over the last days and weeks.

At the doorway, I turn around and look at her still body one last time. I will not see my mother again until the funeral.

I thank the nurses, and make my way out of the Palliative Care Unit. To the elevators. To the lobby. Out into the cold night. Inside the car, my hands are locked frozen onto the wheel, and I begin to shake with tremors. I let the jolt and shock pass through, and with the recall of past experience, I glide over giant waves of grief.

For the first time, I enter the family house without either parent. It’s surreal and unsettling.

From 1976, this house has been a busy noisy compact home for us; I remember us as kids racing to the top of the stairs to claim our very own bedroom.

A family of us: once at 4, now at 2.

Alone now, the walls echo with sounds from the floors, wood frame, and the pipes. I ascend the stairs in the dark, navigating the upper curve from memory. I shuffle to the parents’ bedroom. With a flick of the switch, the unmade bed is in the same final state, when the paramedics moved her into the waiting ambulance earlier that day.

In less than 12 hours from house to hospital, she slipped away, peacefully and quietly into the aether.

With my parents’ passing, I fulfilled my promise to them. There’d been new beginnings, layered with new understanding and sprinkles of forgiveness along the way. I was granted an extra-time bonus in years: a son to his parents, and a parent for his Mom and Dad.

And it is here, I died twice, in the city of Vancouver.

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