Roll 290
Film: Kodak Ektar 100
Developed & scanned: DEP Lab 2025/9/3
Camera: Ricoh GR21 21mm f3.5
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One evening while eating out with my son, I asked him: if I published a book, could I include photos of you in it? He declined without hesitation.
Trying to negotiate, I told him that publishing a book generates royalties — and if he let me use his photos, I'd split the income fifty-fifty. I even started working out the math on sales volume and margins. The numbers didn't move him. He still said no. What surprised me wasn't the rejection itself — it was that he'd already developed a sense that he has a right to privacy. That's a good thing. It means his understanding of the world is growing.
When it comes to photos of children, adults tend to take the lazy route: he can't see it anyway, so why bother asking — just post it. I tried to imagine how my son experiences it. I think having your image published on a parent's social media might feel to a child something like having your photo stuck up in a corner of the school hallway. You don't know who's going to see it. You don't know if you'll be made fun of. Faced with that uncertainty, a child's instinct is simply to say no.
Out of respect for his wishes, I've already removed photos of him from the book project I was planning. As for the photos of him on this website, I'll wait until he can read without phonetic notation — and then let him know this site exists, and tell him that if there's anything he wants taken down, he just has to say so.
This roll documents my son's first day of school in September 2025 — an important milestone, which is why I used the expensive Kodak Ektar 100 I'd been saving. But because of his privacy, most of those photos will stay in my Lightroom library.
Honestly, GR21 images without people in them are a lot less interesting.
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#1
The GR21's 30cm minimum focus distance still doesn't feel particularly close. This shot was taken at -2 EV with a 1/30s shutter — and you can see how well Kodak Ektar 100 holds up under underexposure.
#2
Self-portrait test. Since becoming a father, my exercise has been sporadic — I can't sustain any single activity the way I used to. This was a running session that day. I carried the GR21 in my right hand the whole time; the grip feels surprisingly secure. I wasn't running very fast, though.
#3
I feel like I've been conditioned to photograph this tree every time I pass it. I've already shot it so many times — but I shot it again anyway.
#4
I believe some people genuinely think life comes with a restart button.
#5
Part of my running route takes me up onto Fuzhou Bridge — though honestly I only went up to see if there was anything worth shooting.
#6
Waited a while for a car to pass through.
#7
Waited a while for a bicycle to come through.
#8
The GR21's horizon drift is a recurring problem for me — almost every shot needs rotation and crop correction in Adobe Lightroom.
#9
Not sure what to call this angle. "Between the bridge gaps"?
#10
People often talk about ultra-wide lenses having "visual tension," but I think the term is being misused. What most people mean when they say a wide-angle lens creates tension is the foreground distortion. But to me, visual tension in an image is more about dynamic force within a still frame — the kind of feeling you get watching a tense scene in a film. We say a scene has tension because of what's happening in it, not because foreground elements are distorted. A telephoto shot of a mob coming at you would feel far more tense than any wide-angle distortion.
#11
Dark alleys actually work better with a medium or longer focal length. Ultra-wide just pulls in foreground noise.
#12
Apparently you shouldn't shake thick soy milk before drinking — I only found this out the hard way, when it turned into a foam situation.
#13
I went through a beer phase around this time.
#14
Flash test with the GR21. The flash coverage is notably limited — probably because the lens is so wide.
#15
I was using an old iPad to listen to music a lot around this time — partly just to glance at the album art while it played.
#16
My son's first day of school. We feel genuinely lucky to have been placed with his homeroom teacher — someone who puts serious thought into improving teaching methods and pays attention to the details. You can see it in this photo: the three rows of desks aren't arranged in the conventional straight grid. The side rows are angled slightly inward, forming a gentle arc. The idea is to protect the students on the edges — so they aren't spending the whole day craning their necks at an awkward angle to see the board, which helps them stay more focused. As parents, we're truly grateful that our son gets to learn from a teacher like this.
#17
There's a Confucius statue at my son's school that's been there since I was a student here myself — though it was relocated during the building renovation. My son now attends the same school I went to, but with everything rebuilt, nothing about the environment triggers any particular childhood memories when I walk in.
#18
I have no memory of taking this shot. My notes only say it was shot at 1/4s.
#19
Picking up dinner — hip-level blind shot, aperture-priority f3.5, shutter probably around 1/30 or 1/15.
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That's this roll — Ricoh GR21 21mm f3.5 with Kodak Ektar 100. Thanks for reading.
