Photo Gallery: Bangkok Days (Fujica)

My brother and I are a lot more alike than I normally like to admit.

Besides our common interests in travel, religion, and culture, we also share a common hobby: film photography.

Kyle currently shoots on our Granddad's old Olympus camera, which I also used for high school photography class years ago.

My brother left me a few rolls of film to get processed in Bangkok, since even black and white is so cheap to develop here (color $3 and b/w- $5 per roll).

While I was at it, I got a couple rolls developed that I had been sitting on too. Here's the second test roll from my "new" 1970 Fujica Compact 35.

Shot on a roll of Lomography 400

self portrait!

I'm still trying to get a hang of the camera. It has a light sensor, but I suspect that it hasn't worked in some time, so I never shoot on "auto mode". I have to adjust the f-stop manually, and I'm still learning how to do that, because Granddad's camera was automatic!

the city

One thing that has really impressed me about this camera is its ability to shoot exceedingly well in low light! Sometimes in bright sunlight, the photos get quite washed out; the sky ends up just white, and the contrast is a little too high (probably my fault, not being used to the manual aperture settings) but in low light, it has an excellent range! When shooting at sunset, or even indoors in the dark, like in an underground subway, Fujica turns out some of her best.

subway

One afternoon, I decided to cut through Chulalongkorn University as a shortcut across downtown. "Chula" is the top university in Thailand, and the campus is one of the most beautiful I've ever seen, with its Thai architecture and lotus ponds.

lotus pond

 Because of its age, the camera's film-speed setting only goes up to ISO 200. I think I would like to try a roll of 100 sometime to try to really test its range. This is shot on a roll of ISO 400, so I had to lower the f-stops to prevent the whole roll from being overdeveloped.

Keep following to watch me learn more about this camera and re-discover film as a medium! I'm going to keep practicing all the time!

Chulalongkorn University