The Taiwan Photo Club
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.
Thanks for the blog Poagao. Your writing is great.
Comment by Michael — November 26, 2008 @ 4:25 am
[…] I shot. Most are a bit cliche, I know. I guess I’ll have to create an account on flickr since TC created a group there, even though I’d much rather stick to my own website and deviantArt […]
Pingback by Brian Q. Webb » Blog Archive » Dragon Mountain Temple Pictures — December 3, 2008 @ 10:25 am
i didn’t hear about this meeting until 2 days before, and by that time i had already made plans to go riding with my wife. perhaps next time. i always miss out on meeting you, TC. 🙁
Comment by MJ Klein — December 23, 2008 @ 12:36 am