I have a confession to make. After all I've boasted and bragged (not really) about not having a phone, I actually do have an iPhone. I've had an iPhone since April 2018. OK, I've physically had an iPhone in my apartment since April 2018 after I went down to Kaohsiung for a family matter that required my signature and my aunt foisted an old iPhone on me in case I decided I needed wanted needed a phone. Figuring the iPhone was a spare and likely no sacrifice on my aunt's part, I accepted it and upon returning to Taipei, placed it in a ziplock bag with some silica packets and stuffed it away out of sight and out of mind. 

Recognition of the iPhone in my apartment wasn't revived until over a year later when I got Samsung blootueth Galaxy buds for my computer. I wondered if, even without a 4G phone account, the iPhone could be used as a bluetooth mp3 player. I'm technologically inept, so it took about a month before I concluded it cannot. The month included several weeks before I found my aunt had included a sim card hidden in the iPhone case so I could actually activate it, only to find iPhones won't sync with anything but the latest version of iTunes (at least I'm assuming that's the reason for my computer's immediate and unequivocal (almost disdainful) rejection of the iPhone or vice versa). Years ago I tried a newer version of iTunes, but it was so unsightly and counter to my use of iTunes that I immediately re-installed the older version and stuck to it with every new laptop I've gotten. There will be no syncing this iPhone to my computer and no loading music onto it.

This epitomizes my relation with smartphone technology, mind you. Useless. All dead ends.

But fiddling with this iPhone also reminded me this thing is a camera, too! I was actually aware of that fact, believe it or not, but didn't care since I had all but hard-stopped photography way back in 2011. After smartphones and their camera capabilities started to become ubiquitous, I was really happy that I had already stopped shooting because they rendered my kind of street shooting meaningless with everyone shooting everything all the time, and the truth of the matter is my photography was nothing special and no better than what everyone was photo-dumping online. Why bother?

But I fiddled with the iPhone 6 camera just out of curiosity.

September 2, 4:56 p.m. - The neighborhood park on the block I live on. They fenced off the playground area for several weeks and now it appears they're building something over the concrete slides that haven't changed since I moved here. I'm curious what they're doing to it.

September 8, 4:34 p.m. - Riverside park near the closest access point by bike from where I live (Minsheng E. Rd). The arches of Maishuai Bridges #1 and #2 visible. The closest riverside park access point on foot, if I was, say, hypothetically in excruciating abdominal pain, from my apartment, less than half a mile, is by the closer bridge.

Although not at all interested in doing it again, it got me looking around my apartment at whatever was remnant of photography. I dug up a Ricoh Caplio R4 digital point-and-shoot that actually still works! The screen is a bit foggy (but was always terrible anyway), but the battery still had charge(!) and apparently I had taken some shots with it in 2016 (prior to that, the last pics are from 2008). I also have a Canon IXUS 860 IS digital point-and-shoot that succeeded the Ricoh and was a much better camera, but its battery was completely depleted. Then I remembered laptops have SD memory card ports so I was able to inspect what activity there had been between 2011 and when the battery died, and found images on it taken here and there until 2015. Not a lot, mind you, about a hundred pictures with almost half taken at the National Air and Space Museum annex outside D.C., and I do remember whenever I used the camera I had no immediate intention of doing anything with the pictures. I was just putting them into the camera. I was done with "photography".

I created a folder cache for those years to put into my records on my computer, but it's quite paltry. When I was actively shooting I had folders organized by months (digital) or rolls (film) in folders by years/series, organized by camera. The whole of my photo records comes in at almost 23GB (not high quality) and 436 folders, including some 16 years of black & white shooting.

I still have a Lomo Fisheye 2 that even has film in it. The last roll of Lomo Fisheye I had developed was in July 2010 (and none of that appears to have been posted anywhere, indicating reasons for the photography hard-stop actually started a while before the actual stop), so I assume the roll was loaded right after that. Three frames had been exposed, but I have no intention of finishing the roll, although after nearly 10 years it might be interesting. The camera is covered in crud and I'm considering giving it a cosmetic cleaning just to give it the respect it's due.

The only film SLR I still have here is my brother's Nikon N70 and it hasn't stored well (no ziplock or silica pack storage). It's a very sad camera, but not beyond rehabilitation if I wanted to use it. I don't, but I do still have a roll of Ilford XP2 Super in the fridge that expired in 2012. Admittedly, film that old makes me want to shoot it just to see the results (sometimes expired film, unlike food, brings serendipity). The SLRs that I took back to New Jersey after I stopped shooting are my Pentax ZX-5n, which I loved, and a digital Nikon D80 that my brother gave me after he upgraded, but I only used it for a few months before the hard-stop.

Ricoh Caplio R4 (I'm quite pleased that for my kind of photography, smartphones render inferior image quality from even digital point-and-shoots):

September 22, 4:02 p.m. - Fuming Ecological Park (富民生態公園), actually just a glorified neighborhood park that's really, really angry - it's fuming! (I'm actually making fun of the English signage for the park, 富民 should be Fumin). Hey, no one gets it, but I laughed when I saw it.

4:05 p.m. - The R4 has always given me blurry results in poor light, but these kids were also moving as I spy shot them. 

4:22 p.m. - Shooting north from Minquan Rd. Bridge. I'm right above the flood wall that protects residents in case the Keelung River floods during typhoons. The Keelung River on the right makes a hard left turn west and runs south of Neihu District directly ahead.

4:29 p.m. - Back down off the Minquan Bridge, since I didn't intend to cross the bridge, by the river bank shooting south with the arches of the two Maishuai Bridges under the rather plain, utilitarian Minquan Bridge.