For once, the weather coordinated perfectly with the weekend; dismal gray rain all week, followed by a brilliant, cloudless Saturday. Sunday was the same as I set out for the first meeting of the Taiwan Photo Club at noon at Forker’s Restaurant near the intersection of Yanji St. and Zhongxiao East Road. The place was crowded, but the group had established domination over the rear section, including two tables. I saw a bunch of people there I knew as well as even more whom I didn’t know. Though I’d invited a couple of people, I felt a bit discombobulated, as tends to be the case in a massively multiplayer real world environment. Someone said I looked smaller in real life than I seem online.

Lunch was a pretty good hamburger and fries. Darren Melrose, whose idea it was to meet, gave a speech, during which I impolitely scoffed down my meal, which had come later than anyone else’s due to the aforementioned weirdness. He gave out a rules for a photo scavenger hunt, but I have to say I was more interested in the hefty fellow next to me’s bag full of old rangefinders and lenses. Someone else had a Leica M6, which felt good but not like the M3.

It turned out that a lot of people there didn’t know much or care much about Flickr, so perhaps one of the next meeting’s topics will be about using the site. There were bits of things that interested me and bits that didn’t; we’ll just have to see where it goes.

When we emerged from the back of the restaurant after the meal, we found a change of season had taken place while we were inside; it was now cool and cloudy. Some of the film people expressed dismay as they had packed sunny-weather film in their cameras.

We took the subway to Longshan Temple. On the train I felt like I was surrounded by people with loaded guns as I surveyed all of the expensive black machinery adorning the various group members as they looked around for targets.

At the temple, the group stalled in a morass of indecision before David Reid and I rolled our eyes and just walked out into the considerable crowd of the temple. I took a few shots, but quickly grew bored and a little irritated. To me, photography is the solitary act of uncovering the remarkable among the ordinary; I wasn’t really in the mood for it that afternoon, though. I walked back and forth taking pictures of various annoyed-looking people. I’d only been to the temple last week, though that was at night. I did enjoy chatting with the other photo group people there, but I wasn’t really in the mood to take pictures.

I had another appointment later, so I left around 4:30pm, feeling bereft of ideas. Sometimes I get really tired of the pictures I take and feel the need to do something different. I should have brought the M3 I guess, so just taken pictures with my phone all day.

A book was just published here called “1-100 Dreams” including small articles about 100 people, one for each age from 1 year old to 100 years old. I was selected for 39. I’d been under the impression that they had simply chosen 100 random people, but when I found the book at the big Eslite by city hall last night (the copy they mailed to me went to the wrong address), I was surprised to find quite a few actual celebrities inside. I suppose they had to sell it somehow.

In other news, Blues Bash V went pretty well. As the Dream Community (the manager is Dream #46 in the above list, btw) has a nice new building with two performance spaces, we did two shows, one outside and unplugged, and another inside a boomy bar space. There were several bands from Japan and Korea, though the Korean rock band had no actual blues to display. Former DPP Legislator Lin Chuo-shui showed up, stony faced in a crowd of happy faces, or at least until we started playing. Then he smiled: a real accomplishment, that.

Good music, good food, no police calls, no violence or complaints, and good weather. I’d still rather have BBVI in Bitan.

Now that real Winter has arrived, and my work on the film is wrapping up, my thoughts are turning to travel. I’ve taken so little time off this year that, even after subtracting the vacation I can exchange for money as well as the vacation I can transfer to next year’s total, I still have seven days I have to use before the end of the year, else I lose it. I’m thinking of a trip to southern Spain over the Chinese New Year break to see where Sergio Leone filmed his spaghetti westerns, but anything before that will have to be closer to home, Japan most likely, though preferably a part of that country I’ve never seen. I’ll post details once I’ve figured out what I’m doing exactly.

The fact that I’m currently uploading pictures I took the day Sandman’s son was born over two weeks ago got me to thinking about different levels of photography. The birth, by the way, was amazing; I’d never seen anything like it, though the closest I got to the actual event was the waiting room. But the happiness and celebration afterwards was very moving and an honor to be a part of.

But as I was saying, due to various factors it took me over two weeks to get around to downloading, processing and uploading the pictures. For events like that, I take my big DSLR and lenses with me, as I’m sure that I’ll be wanting to take pictures. That’s the top level, at least for me.

Most of the time, however, I just keep my compact Sigma DP1 on me, as it’s easy to store in my backpack and has excellent image quality, if not great low-light capabilities or more than one focal length. That’s the next level.

Today, though, I discovered another level, a slightly disconcertingly attractive one, in fact: using my mobile phone camera, which really isn’t a very good camera at all, I can take a picture, label it, geotag it and upload it to one or several services like Flickr or Twitter within seconds right from my phone.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. One the one hand, the phone’s camera takes low-res, blurry shots with blown-out highlights and murky shadows. There’s no autofocus or zoom available. On the other hand, it’s there, in my hand, and I feel like the shots I get with it feel more immediate, even if they’re not, mostly likely because people looking at my photostream are seeing what I saw just a moment ago, rather than weeks in the past. Of course, with the passage of time, this immediacy is lost, isn’t it? Or does some of it cling to the picture over the years? I have no idea, but I’m interested in playing around with the idea and seeing what happens.