Ludan/Xietu Lu & Lomography

I found this place on the way back from church a couple of weeks ago.  It was staffed by French speaking adolescents.  Eventually I got someone's attention and found that they did processing.  120?  Yes.  Cross-processing?  Indeedy.  Black and White?  Of course.  Wow.  So I went back this morning this time en-route to church, with an exposed roll of Fujichrome E6.  And, as you can see it was shut.  Well, it IS a big holiday.
Someone at work had told me about a big photographic market, and coincidentally it's quite near St Peter's.  I'd gone looking for it a couple of weeks ago, no luck, but I've sharpened up my Shanghai streets/google map skills since then, so I found it fine this morning, about 3/4 of a mile south of the church on Luban and Xietu Lu.

Three quarters of it was shut, presumably because of the hols, which was probably just as well as I'd have been there all day.  It's amazing, like all the camera shops you'd expect to get in a big city, but all in one place.  The first two floors are digital, the next four are film-related.  Just about every camera I'd heard of was there, and a lot of Chinese ones I hadn't heard of.

Through the windows of closed shops, I saw some remarkable things. One was a flash extension with a telephone-type cable, which I've been after for a while, (no luck with it on eBay).  And the other was a shop which sold nothing but home dev gear - tanks and chemicals.  Hush!  Be still my beating heart!



So this calls for a reframing of the developing situation.  Looks like lomography will lose out.  I've got my dev tank with me.  And a wardrobe that will serve as a darkroom.  I'll have to get another scanner.  But the dev prices in that lomography shop weren't cheap, and so a scanner will pay for itself.  And, anyway, I've gotten used to seeing the whole process through.  It would feel a bit weird, the thought of handing a roll of film over to a stranger, now.  And there's still loads of things I've not tried, like the Ilfotec LC29 and DD-X in the photo there.

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