Hello! Here is Izumi.

And once again I find myself wandering around an old industrial place where still stand the remains of a flour mill from the olden days. I should not really complain (which I am not) or wonder (which I am slightly) as the idea of being a flâneuse is exactly that I do not quite know where my footsteps will be taking me. I should only be prepared for interesting – sometimes strange, sometimes unexpected – sights and Decisive Moments that may cross our paths.

But do Decisive Moments lurk around old manufactories? Do they find an interest in old machinery and peeling paints and rusting stuffs of past industries? Or do they more prefer movements and activities such as are to be found around where busy streets and people are? This I would have thought was more likely to be so.

Or is it because we go to those places that we find them there? If the lioness goes to the plains she expects to find wildebeest. So because of that she does not think of going to the hills. Perhaps if she did she would find other prey that she was not expecting, but be pleasantly surprised to see there.

Yet there I was so, like the sailors of yesteryears finding themselves carried on wind and wave to Serendip, I shall take advantage of my surroundings and show you what my PEN and I found there.

I decided to set myself a challenge once again as I had done with the other abandoned factory and only use the old Pentax A110 lenses on this location. You remember that I talked about and showed you them here. I have the complete set of 18mm, 24mm, 50mm, 70mm and 20-40mm zoom but as you can see the widest is 18mm (36mm in full-frame terms), which is not really wide enough for a location such as this. So I bought a wide-angle adapter which fits on the zoom thinking that as I would have 9mm to 18mm (the equivalent of 18mm to 36mm) in one lens I would now be able to find much satisfaction in my framing.

Let us continue around the site and see how my expectation became my happiness.

The place was closed many years ago and has partly fallen down and crumbled away ever since, even while modern apartment buildings have grown up in its surrounding area.

But there are building materials on the grounds now so perhaps there is a new life destined for the site. I hope that is is importantly historical so the walls that are there now remain as part of whatever is to be newly built.

Such places as these I find fascinating as you can think about all the people who used to be and work and live there before your footsteps came along. This is not to make lesser my interest in the activities of the streets of today and their Decisive Moments, of course. In fact it can be a very happy partner because I sometimes wonder if someone once did in their days at these places what I am doing now. In fact I know people did in other places because we have the works of Hiroshige and T Enami and Yvon and M Cartier-Bresson and Vivian Maier and Jeff Carter and many others to look upon in our days.

Perhaps in some days to come people will even look at my happy photographs and wonder also about the person who walked the streets and captured them.

Now I must tell you that I had a disappointment here which is the reason that there are no very wide angled photographs of the place. I found that the wide angle adapter I got for the Pentax zoom lens is not very good and makes for very soft photographs with much coloured fringing around objects. I do not know if it is possible to get a better one. If not, I shall have to use the PEN lenses to satisfy my wide desires.

I hope you have enjoyed another look at a place of the past rather than a street of the present. As I said before, the two different subjects can live quite happily together inside my head and eventually also on the gallery walls, I'm sure.

So goodbye and thank you once again.

Your friend,

Izumi.