d'NA Taiping: Revisited

Out of curiosity, and because Tim showed me his recent Taiping portfolio, I rescanned my d'NA Taiping 2009 photos, this time on the Plustek scanner at home.

Joan left a comment on this post asking about the group picture on the rocky wall, and I shall begin there.

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d'NAers at the rocky wall on the trail up Bukit Larut.

d'NAers on a rock, on the Bukit Larut descent.

Tree ferns, Bukit Larut.

Joan at the Allied War Cemetery, Taiping.

View into the lobby, Peking Hotel, Taiping.

(Note the incredible tonal range from the bright signage out front, to the relatively dim hallway.)

Road crossing at night; view from a passing train.

Makes me think of Eric Peris's work on moving dancers. In his words: "I have even reduced Ramli Ibrahim to a blur."

KL Railway Station, pre-dawn.

This is the view from the other side of the train. The first shot I took—in the original post—remains among my favourite railway scenes to date.

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On the trip I put two new pieces of gear—the 28mm and 105mm lenses—through their paces; the former is among my favourite and most-used lenses today, and the latter testified to Nikon's tank-like manual-focus lens engineering, surviving a rather nasty drop from a Land Rover up on Taiping's Bukit Larut.

I shot two Ilford films: HP5 Plus 400 (two group shots above) and FP4 Plus 125 (the rest of the photos above). HP5 was my go-to film until I discovered Kodak's Tri-X during the ET shoot; the former has great contrast, while the latter is much more generous in the midtones and has a certain granular characteristic which I promptly fell in love with.

FP4 Plus, however, remains largely unrivalled among all the B/W films I've shot—it seems to come into its own shot in relatively diffuse, low-light, low-contrast situations. The pictures above were developed at E-Six, and it remains to be seen what I might have been able to pull out of it had I developed it at home.