Category: Shanghai

Photographing China II

Pentax KS-1 with 1:2,4/35mm lens and two LED panels mounted on a tripod. I trigger the shutter with a remote control. Not the most professional setup, but it gets the job done surprisingly well.

And this is what really brought me to China: Photographing old periodicals in the libraries of Shanghai. The main objective this time? Xinwen zhaopian (news photos), a catalog published by the Xinhua News Agency twice every week, for newspapers, magazins and other work units of the media sphere to select and order pictures from. It covers the period from 1958 to 1987 with barely a gap inbetween and is as close to the “photographic mainstream” during those years as you can get.

One-way street scene/Shanghai revisited

One way street in the vicinity of docks near Huangpu river. Taken some time in 2012.
One way street in the vicinity of docks near Huangpu river. Taken some time in 2012.

This one is from the archive, one of my earliest attempts to come to terms with Shanghai photographically. Now that I finished the set up of the slide copier, and can digtize negatives much faster than before, I want to go through all my negatives again and collect the good ones taken on the streets of Shanghai.

This project will have to wait a bit though, for soon I will spend a month in Shanghai to undertake some research. Not sure yet if there will also be some time for photography, but boy I’m curious to see how the city changed while I was gone.