these have been piling on my shelves, coming from random places and addictions. i like the fact that only the red ones made it to shanghai. very china-like.

more organized collections.

hanzillion is a (recently started) photo project*, a collection of the zillion hanzi, or chinese characters, found on the streets of china.
it works as my homework: when i hunt for them, my photographic memory starts to remember their strokes and forms. which i desperately need to do, since i have at least some 3000 to go before i can read a newspaper…

and yet, foreign as 99.9% of these characters still are to me, i can’t but marvel at their mystery, different typographies and simple beauty. it’ll be a work in progress, for a very long time.

* i just can’t seem to get enough of them!

mirror cities: a beautiful shortcut between lisbon & tokyo.

walking around with the holga in the park, freezing my fingers and toes in the cold. more here.

i’m might be seriously falling in love with this camera.

anitanachina.com é um projecto novo: uma foto por dia durante o ano do rato, para ajudar a mostrar a (nossa) vida na china nos dias que correm. vem na sequência das muitas vezes que nos fizeram a pergunta “como é a china?”, e da vontade de a mostrar, de forma mais coerente e explicada, aos amigos e família.

é ao mesmo tempo um exercício fotográfico (para me obrigar a saltar da cadeira e ir fotografar) e uma maneira de me obrigar a escrever em português - tarefa complicada nos dias que correm.

o nome surgiu de um comentário no flickr, pela joana. :)

anitanachina.com is a new project: a photo a day for the year of the rat, to help portray our daily life in china.
it’s a photographic exercise, but at the same time, it’s written in portuguese because i miss writing in my mother tongue (a task that is becoming increasingly difficult). english readers should find it quite easy to navigate though.

the name “anita na china”, literally “anita in china” is a play with some portuguese child books that used to feature a character, anita, discovering the world around her: anita in the train, anita goes to the farm, anita in the theater, etc. the idea for the name was given to me in a flickr photo comment, by joana. :)

JS: You still prefer (and will probably always prefer) film to digital photography. Why is this?

HPC: To my eye, there’s something integral to photography that’s not translating from film to digital. This isn’t to say that I think that digital is crap, but there’s definitely something missing.

I also think that a photographer’s relationship with shooting is quite different when it’s film and when it’s digital. If I buy fresh Polaroid film for my pinhole camera, it’s roughly $3.75 a shot. Shooting with an SX-70 is roughly $1 a shot. The choices that I make are an important and necessary part of my process.

With digital, you pretty much shoot ‘til your card’s full. I guess, I miss the ongoing interior editorial conversation that happens in my head.

taken from a recent interview with heather champ on photography and her web presence.

heather is one of those people i really admire: she started the mirror project (back in the day when i was trying to tame the zenit), takes magical pictures with different types of cameras (like the polaroids above) and is also the community manager at flickr.

check out her new ongoing project, polaroid 366: a polaroid a day for a (leap) year.

depois do último post, procuro por “portugal” na galeria. dois insólitos resultados: uma infantaria em estranhos preparos (mas tão portuguesa) e uma foto do rei d. manuel II.

o último rei de portugal. eis que (mesmo sem ser monárquica) ver um rei português assim, a preto e branco, me deixa quase sem palavras face ao realismo e à próximidade temporal.

nas pinturas a óleo ou nos painéis de azulejos que nos habituamos a associar à nossa monarquia, tudo ganha uma nuvem de misticismo, de tempos longínquos… numa foto não. um rei nosso a meio passo, visto assim sem poses, no flickr.

[english summary: the post is about the last king of portugal, which i found in a flickr photo from the library of commons - and how unusal it is for me to see a portuguese kind on a photo. portugal’s monarchy ended in 1910].