I have just returned to Tokyo after a fantastic 10 day trip to Shanghai to visit Alek and Michael as well as to shoot some photos for my portfolio and this site (hopefully the galleries will be ready by early summer). As I prefer the overall colour range that Kodak offers, I mainly used their Portra Vivid Color 160 & 400 negative films, as well as Ilford Delta Professional 100 & 400 black and white negative film to shoot the older, more run-down parts of the city. While there, Alek and I also took a day trip to Suzhou, the so-called "Venice of the Orient", which is a very old city filled with beautiful gardens and canals. (Note to self: if you take spare camera batteries when you travel, don't forget to actually put them in your day bag...the day you forget, your camera *WILL* run out of batteries).

Experiment-wise, I also tried out Polaroid's medium format 80-series film (84 and 89) for the Polga, but found it a little more tricky than just point-and-click and peeling off the backing paper. For starters, the Polaroid back mostly covers the Polga's viewfinder (which is not 'through-the-lens' anyway), so it's very difficult to actually see what you are shooting, resulting in lots of sky in the first few shots. As this is the first time I've used that kind of film, I had a few development errors due to removing the backing paper too soon (damn, those chemicals are messy), and not letting the photo paper dry long enough. By the end of the trip though, I got the hang of it and came back with a few lovely images from both Shanghai and Suzhou. Now I'm ready to play with 120 film for the Holga.