I’ve been mostly out travelling these past few weeks (lots of photos and writing on that to come), but I am so glad to be back in Madras nee Chennai. I still haven’t fully gotten used to the heat and humidity though. But the more I live in the city, the more the eventual move from Bangalore is starting to make sense.
It’s an area of the city that I don’t go to often, but when I do, I make sure I take as many photos as I can. This time around it was to meet a friend for a quick breakfast, so took only my phone, but the Halide app is such a delight to use, it makes me not miss the Fuji much.
At the beginning of the year, we went up to Coonoor, the less noisy and crowded brother of Ooty. The idea was to work during the days and spend time walking, photographing and meeting friends in the mornings and evenings.
Coonoor and the Nilgiris are renowned for their tea. However, most tea gardens in the area where we stayed had turned fallow, so the owners had sold them off for housing and other redevelopment. On one such plot was our little cabin. While our part of the area had become a spread out housing project, there were plenty of tea gardens on the other side of the road that neatly bisected the small valley.
After a week or so in the cabin, we went over to a friends beautiful place a little above Coonoor. There was much good company, delicious food and long walks in the woods nearby.
We also drove upto Ooty one day for lunch, and on the way back, stopped at the beautiful Fernhill Palace for a coffee.
A few months ago, while cleaning out some storage boxes, I came across a couple of neatly packed lenses. Neatly packed, because of my father. Absolutely forgotten and hoarded, also my father. One of them was a Helios-40 in an M39 mount and the other was a Chinon 35mm f/2.8 in an M42 mount. The Helios sadly was beyond repair, with its front element cracked totally.
The Chinon, however, was considerably in better shape. All the lens elements looked good, other than some gunk and fungus build-up. The focus ring was also very tight. I hadn’t repaired a lens in a long time and debated for weeks in my head whether to do it myself or send it off someone more experienced. In the end, I decided that I want the challenge and that if I fucked it all up, I’ll still have other 35mm manual lenses to shoot with.
With Youtube as a guide, purchases at the local hardware store and Amazon, I went to work. The hardest part was the disassembly because it requires the most focus and I simply couldn’t find a stretch of time where I could just do it, so everything happened in very frequent bursts. To cut the long story short, I managed to pull everything apart easily, clean the lens elements (Hydrogen Peroxide, ftw), blow the dust away, clean surfaces etc. and put it all back together in about a few weeks.
To say that I love this lens is an understatement. With the way the Fuji X-T20 renders colours, photos from this lens have a dream like, painterly look. It has its imperfections, of course — the purple fringing is very bad, so is the bloom — but when you work around those and frame photos, the result is so full of character.
I’ve always wanted to be a painter, but lacked the required skill, but in ever so small terms, this lens is enabling me to act like one.
Maybe it is the season, or my mind, but something’s shifted in the way I look at the world when I photograph these days. Instead of seeing vibrance and contrast and texture, I am seeing a smoothed monotone. As if every part of the frame is collapsing into a singular, formless element.
I don’t know what to make of it, other than acknowledge it for now and see where it goes.
For someone who really likes strong lines (leading, intersecting, away) in his photographs, I’ve somehow never taken to architectural photography. More than a decade or so ago, I was a production assistant to a very famous architectural photographer from Bombay, and using skills learned on that job, I managed to score a couple of small gigs in the field. Beyond that, I never developed the thinking and framing muscles for such kind of photography.
All that seems to have changed in the past few months. The primary catalyst seems to have been my recently acquired iPhone 13 Pro and its 77mm ‘telephoto’ lens. Now, most architectural photographers would simply dismiss such a focal length for taking pictures of buildings as a joke, but I really, really like the medium compression such a lens engenders. It is not the sharpest lens either, but there is a certain kind of look it has, especially when shot using RAW.
A secondary reason is that I’ve been really enjoying developing RAW images using the Darkroom app. My Capture One subscription is up for renewal soon, and I am seriously debating dropping it in favour of Darkroom, which at a quarter of the price is quite a steal. My only hesitation stems from the fact that Apple does not handle my Fuji X-T20’s lossless compressed RAW files and I usually shoot in that mode to save space on SD cards (Darkroom uses the built-in Photos app as its library container and browser).
I was rearranging a few folders in my Capture One library and chanced upon these pictures of the amazing Pamban bridge. I am fairly certain I’ve shared a couple of these before, but I’ve never them on the blog. So here they are.
Opened in February 1914, the 2km bridge connecting mainland India and the island of Rameshwaram shortened the journey between India and Sri Lanka considerably.
The bridge features a double-leaf bascule section roughly midway to enable fishing trawlers and barges from nearby islands to passthrough.
I’ve crossed the bridge on a few occasions and each time it is a thrill to be a train window or door and watch the sea crash against the piers while you trundle on, swaying gently.
All photos were shot with a Pentax K100D with a DA 50-200mm f/4-5.6 ED lens.
I can never call it Chennai, to me the city is always Madras.
Over the past few months, my work has taken me there a number of times. More than half my team sits there, and try as much as I want, I don’t think I can ever fully get into all-remote work, so these visits are a welcome distraction and much needed energy boost.
A few days ago, I happened to visit, just in time for Madras Day. I missed the official (and unofficial) events because of work, but found time to take a few train and bus rides, walk around a bit and photograph.
I didn’t carry my Fuji X-T20 this time, but an iPhone paired with the Halide app shooting in ProRAW is a very good substitute.
I’ve always considered Egmore to be the prettier railway station. It is feels a lot less intimidating than Central, thus allowing one to walk more leisurely and take in more of the wonderful architecture.
Departing Velachery on the MRTS line. I wish I had good things to say about this line, but about the only charitable thing I can say is that it does its job, nothing more.
These old cement benches still remain on the platform and retain the old name of the station. I’ve always wondered about the placement of these. Baking in the hot sun the whole day, with no shade or cover. I can’t imagine even trying to rest on them at 3pm!
One evening, we went to dinner at the fabulous Taj Connemara, a hotel that’s been around in some shape or form since the early 1800s.
Followed by a nice long walk around Mount Road and its iconic sights.
A few more postcards in random order.
For a while, we talked. Then for another time, we just sat next to each other and read the books we were carrying. After that, we shared a large ice-cream.
Much later, we decided to walk the neighbourhood we were in. A place that had been once familiar to us — individually and together — now, almost unrecognisable. For her, these rain tree lined streets were about navigating heartbreak, a difficult marriage and finding herself as a person and the art that such discovery engenders. For me, these narrow lanes, leading into leafy cul-de-sacs, were an avenue for my hedonism and cavalierness.
We talked and recollected and laughed and shed some tears until we reluctantly left the area. Each wanting to dive deeper back into memory, the comfort of it, despite the sadness and indifference. Fighting the thing that Teju Cole once wrote about, “The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.”
Very often these days when walking about, many of the photos I take seem to come about because in thinking about the framing, I am also thinking of a poem that goes with it. In this case, I saw the cart and immediately thought of a Pablo Neruda poem from his beautiful The Book of Questions. Paraphrasing it a little here,
“How did the abandoned vegetable cart
win its freedom?”
