The entryway hasn't changed – from 2005:

One strong memory is from when I bought my very first brand new film camera, in 2008 – a Bessa R4A with a 28mm lens – and my first photos with it were taken there after running into a couple of Flickr friends:

I since took other cameras there (2010):

But also took other lovely portraits outside other, nearby cafés – this one on Smith St in 2013:

In the process of digging, some other good café window views came up:

• from the northern edge of Thornbury in 2010:

• from South Preston with a pinhole camera in 2010:

• from Fremantle in 2009:

• from a long-gone café in Xi'an in 2013:

• and from South Preston in 2017:

Nothing beats the window at Captains of Industry in the heart of the city, though – I have countless photos of it:

#FilmPhotography

[ This is a #NowAndThen post, where I try to dig through my #photography #archives ]

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

I visited Lăng Minh Mạng, the mausoleum for Emperor Minh Mạng:

...and made it to a few others – Chùa Thiên Mụ overlooking the Perfume River, Lăng Khải Định a little out of town, and so on. The heat was getting to me by the time I reached the Imperial City, so I only explored a small part of it.

I reckon ~90% of the people I saw wearing an Áo dài in Vietnam were doing it for photographic purposes, with a guy juggling camera gear hovering nearby (the male gaze, and all that). Wandering around in Lăng Tự Đức, the tomb of Emperor Tự Đức – “the last Vietnamese monarch to rule independently” (ref) – I saw this:

Just as I'd arrived in Huế, an old colleague asked if I was going to visit Chùa Từ Hiếu (the Từ Hiếu Pagoda), where Thích Nhất Hạnh had started his life as a monk and recently returned to live out his final days before passing away earlier in the year. I managed to add it to my driver's itinerary. Having racked up so many miles in temples in Thailand, I'd be lying if I tried to say this one felt particularly “special” somehow – every temple has something – but it was certainly peaceful. Thai temples always seem to have an underlying buzz of activity that seemed absent here, at least this morning.

Perhaps the most pleasant time I had was walking the long way around the lake in Lăng Minh Mạng, hearing birds and distant noises as I caught shade from the trees and trudged through the grass. There weren't any people nearby, and it was almost like time stopped. I enjoyed it so much I don't have any photos from it, but it wasn't too far off this:

(what was I listening to while assembling this? you'll never guess).

#travel #Vietnam #Photography #FilmPhotography #history #temples #pagodas #mausoleums

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

I took a few film shots this morning, and only one phone shot:

What have I got from prior years, around this time? Five years ago I was in #Thailand:

Ten years ago, I was in #Fitzroy looking at somebody's photography exhibition, in the middle of a haze of confusion around the new life I was trying to settle into:

Fifteen years ago, I'd flown to #Adelaide to help setup someone's WAN connection in their new office, and unexpectedly needing to stay overnight:

Twenty years ago I was watching Grand Salvo play:

#FilmPhotography #street #memories #music

[ This is a #NowAndThen post, where I try to dig through my #photography archives ]

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

My lovely collection of film cameras, no matter how often I dipped into them to try a different one on each short trip, spent their time at the bottom of my bag while I walked and moped and struggled to find beauty in the everyday. When I did find a shot, my phone was just too convenient to avoid. Even when I recently travelled overseas – at last! – hoping for some inspiration in other places, the film shots didn’t come back looking that great, especially compared to the phone ones.

It feels like I’ve finally had a breakthrough, though, with a bunch of “keepers” from my first roll of JapanCameraHunter Streetpan 400. It’s enough to make me love black & white film again:

Wandering back in my archives, though, tells a slightly different story – there’s been a few more (film) winners in the last two years than I remembered, both from my much-loved Leica M6:

...and the medium format point-and-shoot Fuji GA645i that still occasionally surprises me after a decade:

But this is why I should be spending more time with my archives – it’s a great way to remind myself of what I have done, and helps challenge the devil on my shoulder that keeps telling me “meh. You’ve lost interest. It’s time to get rid of all that gear.”

#photography #travel #archives #film

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

I’ve been hanging around the Internet since the days of UUCP connections. The distributed / less-centralized nature of those times is something that still appeals to me, which is why I’m still here #selfhosting and hosting for others – I’ve loved empowering friends to get their thoughts up and into the Internet so that it’s not just the same old nerds like me in here.

I’m trying out WriteFreely as a way to better aggregate my writing and some other information. This post serves as both an #introduction and a test.

what do I like to do?

A significant part of my brain seems to be filled with #music – lots of it. I used to try and blog about it long ago, but now I'd rather just keep listening than finding ever-more convoluted ways to describe it.

I love #walking, especially as a way to explore #FilmPhotography (or digital #photography). I’m not scared of #PublicTransport and quite like #trains.

My photography goes way back on Flickr, a little less further back on Instagram and I've more recently been experimenting with Pixelfed – see @cos@pixelfed.social or @cos@pixelfed.au. Either way, I try to find beauty in the everyday with my images. I'm particularly fascinated by blankness.

what do I care about?

The world's a better place when we don't feel we need to hide who we really are. To me, this means (among other things):

• Trans rights are human rights.
• Black lives matter.
• Human beings are not “illegal”.
• Love is love.
• People should have control over their own bodies.
• Science is real.
• Kindness is everything.

where can I be found on social media?

These days, the Fediverse is where it's at – you can find me at @cos@aus.social.

what do I do for work?

I spent a long time as a systems administrator, network engineer, systems engineer and otherwise, but these days I focus on the people aspects of #DevOps, #SRE or #PlatformEngineering by managing teams, growing people, and helping everyone understand that Software’s Not Just For Christmas. If you want to know more, you can read my LinkedIn Profile.

what's some other tech-related stuff that I'm interested in?

#emacs is not a dirty word. Given my change of work focus, I’d guess that 98% of my time in it nowadays is spent using #orgmode to keep notes on what’s going on at work.

Once upon a time, I helped some friends start a #Linux User Group called LUV. It's been a long time since I was involved, but I'm glad that it kept going for all these years – plenty of other people put in a lot of work to make it so, and more power to them! Despite that love for Linux, I've enthusiastically used other #Unix / Unix-like operating systems over the years too, and happily use a Mac desktop these days – it's all ok by me.