Over the last few weeks, Shanghai has had some great light for street photography. It’s been unusually clear, although quite cold for Shanghai - less than zero degrees centigrade on several days. The good run of light came to an end about a week ago as well as Shanghai’s good run with zero coronavirus cases. Apart from the fact that there is barely a shadow to be seen in our current foggy weather, some parts of downtown Shanghai are in a code red, which is not the same as a full lockdown. I’m currently concerned that if I wander into one of these areas, my mandatory health QR code will turn from green to red, so I’m mostly sticking to my neighbourhood lately.
Anyway, over maybe four outings, I shot 5 rolls of Fujifilm Provia 100F in either a Hasselblad Xpan or a Fujifilm XT-1. These cameras are identical apart from the colour and branding, but since I have two of them, I think it’s good to give them some exercise once in a while.
I chose to shoot Provia 100F, a slide film, because I just think it looks so much better than colour negative when you use it good light, although it is also a more challenging stock to shoot than colour negative. You really have to get the exposure right. It has accurate colours, fine grain and high contrast. Not many people shoot slide film these days and considering the way Fujifilm keeps culling film stocks, Provia 100F’s days are numbered. This month, Fujifilm announced that they were ceasing production of Pro 400H, another one of my favourite film stocks.
I pushed some of the rolls here to 400 ASA since I’ve found that it pushed really well. I actually came across this by accident when I shot some rolls in a Nikon F100 over in Europe a couple of years ago and forgot that I’d set the ASA to 320. The lab was surprised at how well it came out. It’s certainly much better pushed than the discontinued Fujifilm Astia 100F, which I used to shoot a lot when I started out in photography. I found that blacks turned a bit cruddy if you rated it at 400 and asked the lab to process it as such (known as a two stop push).
The useful thing about pushing film is that you have higher shutter speeds to get correct exposure so you can shoot longer into the day. The other benefit is being able to increase depth of field (focus). This is particularly handy for street photography. If there’s enough light you can ‘zone focus’ which means you can set your focus for everything to be sharp from a certain distance.
The photo walks that I took over the past weeks were a great way to reacquaint myself with this city I’ve lived in for almost nine years. I wasn’t really shooting with any kind of theme in mind, I’d just shoot whatever I felt like, but try not to waste film. However since I’ve always been drawn to the stark contrast of old and new in Shanghai, that is one theme that sticks out when I look over these photos.
Generally, I’d walk out my door and head to a pocket of Shanghai’s old towns. One day I covered around 20km by foot. In one case, I headed over to an area I’d shot maybe seven years ago and found that it had vanished without a trace with new empty apartments and a shopping mall where rows of pre WW2 residential compounds used to be.
Most often, I’d just walk straight down Jianguo West Road in the former French Concession until it led me to what used to be Shanghai’s walled city. This area is fast disappearing as its jumble of lane houses, courtyard homes and decaying mansions are replaced with more high rises.
To be fair, Shanghai has done a much better job of preserving its architecture than many other cities - in China or otherwise - and much of the former walled city is, as it once was, a slum. Some people down there don’t even have plumbing. Much of it is now bricked in, boarded up and deserted. It feels like a ghost town.
Still, it’s nice to find neighbourhoods in the old town where people still live since the street life is so lively there. For me, the new areas of high rise living also feel like a ghost town when compared to what they’ve replaced.
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