Time Travelling

Some weeks back I decided to head down to South Bombay (SOBO) to shoot some street photography and in the process try out some new/old equipment. And by that I mean the Olympus IS-10 film camera which was new to me and old to my uncle who gave it to me. 

In a nutshell, its a pretty crappy camera. I don't know what Olympus was trying to do with this bridge, 35 mm full frame camera with limited functionality but I, sure as hell, am not going to use it again. Its plain frustrating to use and the noisy sound that the AF makes while operating made me flinch every time I tried to focus. It was also my first time testing the Lomography 100 film. Most of the shots came out overexposed and I could only save a few after some post processing. 

While shooting there, I re-shot a couple of images of the Taj Hotel in a similar way as I had done a couple of years ago on a different SOBO street shoot. Back then I had used the digital Sony A-200 and was a funky post-processing junkie as is clearly evident from the comparison below (The sepia jpeg is the only version that I haven't deleted from my photo archives).

The images on the left are digital while the ones on the right are film. Despite the completely different shooting  experiences between then and now, I still prefer the film photos over their digital counterparts. After all, there ain't no school like the old school!

First Salary

So I've completed about a month and a half at my first ever job and also had my first salary experience at the start of this month. Weirdly enough, as I held the cheque in my hand, I didn't feel any surge of excitement or for that matter I didn't feel anything at all! I was disappointed about that.

But that changed quickly too...turns out spending money is more exciting than earning it. Go figure! Especially when money is in its electronic form. I would've definitely felt a sense of hesitation were I handling hard cash, but paying it online was way more convenient and quicker. Anyway, I purchased seven rolls of film and a couple of great books on cinema and another book on photography (that's yet to be delivered). Browsing through online retail shops can be addictive!

Strings Attached

A few days back, some friends and I decided to head down to the Furtados shop in Mumbai to buy a brand new, shiny guitar for another friend of ours. His birthday was coming up in a few days and he's destined to leave for the States by the end of July, and as we aren't gonna meet him for at least a couple of years, we thought that the guitar would definitely be a great birthday/parting gift!

So we caught a train from Thane to CST, and then walked the remaining way down to Furtados. The shop looks pretty awesome with guitars, drums, keyboards and other instruments all over the place. While we were there, we saw a guy playing an electric guitar quite well while a girl sat next to him gazing at him with this love-struck expression in her eyes.

Watching this particular scene immediately brought to my mind the image of Lord Rama with his bow in his hand with Sita next to him, gazing at him imploringly with affection. The times may have definitely changed but certain elements clearly haven't. There's still the man, there's still the shiny, stringed instrument and there's still the woman with the nauseating gaze. The purpose of both instruments are obviously different, but they do seem to have the same effect on women. You've gotta admit, there is some sort of hold that a man with a stringed instrument has on a woman! To me its just simply incomprehensible. 

Anyways, after some pointless haggling over the price we did finally purchase the guitar that we wanted (it was a Granada acoustic with an electrical attachment thingy) and I volunteered to carry it on our walk back to CST. On our way back, as we passed St. Xavier's College, I found myself getting many stares from both sexes...women more than men! A few raised eyebrows and a few repressed smiles later, I realized it was the guitar on my shoulders that was creating such an effect.

Women do have a strange affinity to the guitar and I sure as hell don't understand it. Its probably the same reason why band groupies give initial preference to the guitarists over the drummers. Anyways, my friend loved the Granada guitar!

I wonder if he'll experience the same effect when he goes to States......