Uncanny Bingo

Experiments

Relieving the Tedium of Scanning Color Film

I find scanning color film to be tedious and error-prone work—but can turnkey solutions turn in better results?

Stations

Stations: Tokyo

The Tokyo transit system needs no introduction—it’s among the world’s largest and most complex. But its stations are functional, bare, devoid of grandeur or even decoration. Each corridor is an unadorned, square concrete tube, with little to differentiate it from any other corridor in any other station.

Film

Film Review: FOMA Ortho 400

An emulsion with a unique look that really pops outdoors…but it’s prone to overexposure.

Stations

Stations: Lisboa

Lisboa is probably not a place that comes to mind when you think of transit, although Olaias Station regularly makes lists of most unique metro stations in the world. But in truth, the stations of the Lisboa metro are each miniature art galleries, decorated in azuelos—tiles inspired by Moorish

Analog

Extreme Film Pushing: Ilford HP5 Plus @ 6400 (Pt. 2)

Trying once again to push Ilford HP5 plus to 6400, I find more agreeable results. But is it good enough? Spoiler alert: It depends.

Analog

Extreme Film Pushing: Ilford HP5 Plus @ 6400 (Pt. 1)

What happens if we push Ilford HP5 plus to 6400? Let's fuck around and find out. Spoiler alert: It doesn't go as well as I hoped.

Photo Essays

10 Views of Tokyo

Join me to view an entertainment district in Tokyo from above—an ad-hoc collage of the streets of Tokyo reveals the daily life of passersby.

News

Unable to sign in or create an account? It’s fixed.

Bad SMTP configurations. Less than stellar documents. Low attention span. These are all factors that recently led to your frustration when you tried to login or create an account. Those issues should now all be fixed. I would say let me know in the comments if they continue to be

Analog

Extreme Film Pushing: Ilford HP5 Plus @ 3200

I like fast film and I cannot lie. So let's push it, push it real good. And see what we get. Today: Ilford HP5 pushed to 3200.

Photo Essays

Training for Semana Santa in Seville

Holy week is fast approaching, and in Sevilla the devout are training hard for a demanding test of faith—carrying massive floats on their shoulders for the annual parade.

Essays

On “Real Photos” (All Photographs are Lies)

There is no such thing as a ”real picture”, and any attempt to delineate such represents illiberal and unnecessary gatekeeping in the photographic community.

Photo Essays

Getting Lost in the Wholesale Markets of Seoul

Let's get lost in the back alleys and byways of the markets of Seoul, and lose ourselves among the industrial quantities of goods for sale.

Photography

Announcing: Crown + Flint R3

After months of hard work, I'm happy to announce the latest version of my mobile app for analog photographers, Crown + Flint.

Stations

Stations: Praha

When you think of good public transit, I doubt you think of Praha. Or maybe you do, but you picture its extensive network of trams. But the city has an extensive metro system too, and in the city center each station is boldly adorned in the colors of the lines

Essays

Adolf Fassbender (All Photographs are Lies)

Adolf Fassbender, in his 1943 essay “Why Bother?”, laid the foundations for an argument that there can be no purely mechanical photographic portrayal of a scene independent of the photographer making the image.

Stations

Stations: Seoul

The Seoul metro is comprehensive, efficient, clean, and bright. But it is above all else melodic; so melodic that, if you’ve ever been, you‘re hearing those jingles in your head now. I’m very glad to have had the chance in April 2023 to photograph Seoul’s trains

Essays Featured

Setting the Stage—Pictorialism vs Straight Photography (All Photographs are Lies)

This week I dive into the origins of toxic gatekeeping in street photography culture, identifying its roots in a hundred year old beef between two of photography’s earliest movements: pictorialism and straight photography.

Photo Essays

A walk through Myeong-dong night market

This was my first visit to Seoul. I prefer to learn about new cultures through their food, and so one of the top things on my list was to visit the Myeong-dong night market, a nightly festival of Korean street foods that, while pretty touristy, doesn't disappoint. If

Essays Featured

All Photographs are Lies*

No one can agree what street photography is. I think most attempts boil down to gatekeeping, and are built on very shaky intellectual foundations. Let's blow some of that up.

Photo Essays

Breaking Down Albert Cuypmarkt

Like an enormous, slow-breathing organism, Albert Cuypmarkt slowly inhales blocks of vendors and shoppers each morning, and expels them from its paved lungs again each evening. This respiratory process is the product of a dedicated team of roustabouts whose job is to break down the market each night, and build

News

Changing blogging systems

I've outgrown my old blogging system, and (being the new year), I am moving on to the new shiny thing. You, dear reader, couldn't care less. But migrating old posts to the new system will take some time. So if you don't see what

News

Announcing the Open Film Database

I've started a new project, a natural outgrowth of my work on Crown + Flint. My app relies on a database of technical data on film stocks, a database that I currently maintain myself by hand. I've been in the world of open source software for a

Experiments Featured

Introducing the RB67-Pan: Panoramic photos in a medium format camera

It's easy to transform a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera into an inexpensive—if extremely bulky—35mm panoramic camera.

Experiments Featured

Backlighting Negatives (Pt. 3)

If you haven't yet, you might enjoy reading part 1 & part 2 first. I think at this point in my backlighting experiment, we're finally starting to see some really interesting results. For this round, I sought images with maximum contrast in order to simply focus

Equipment

Nitpicking Lenses—Comparing the Industar-50 & Canon 50mm f/1.4

Can inexpensive Russian glass hold up to the pinnacle of Japanese rangefinder optics? I take these two lenses for a head-to-head test—and come to some surprising conclusions.