Busan
A weekend that became a week, trusted film stocks, foreign (x2) photo labs, and my oldest friend.
This is my oldest friend. We’ve been bffs since we were five. We are now 32.
An interesting thing happens when you move halfway around the world… for the second time. Your friends who missed you the first time around who also have grown and are now more financially stable start to consider the notion of visiting you. (It certainly helps to move to a more accessible place than Kuwait during pre-vaccine COVID.) As such, during one of my many sleepless nights/ “I need someone to talk to who’s awake on the other side of the world right now” conversations, my oldest/one of my best friends, Jamie, and I got to talking. I idly said, fully anticipating it to be rejected out of hand, “hey you could come visit me over my Spring Break!”. But I also forgot who I was talking to.
Coffee shop stop on our way to Gorae Photo Lab.
And I say that with love- Jamie is just more hardcore than me. Lives life larger then me, has lived through harder experiences than I have. Suffice to say, when he grabs hold of an idea, he plays it out to its natural conclusion. Nothing in his mind made going on this trip NOT make sense, so he was down for it.
Original plan: him flying to Seoul, staying two nights in my (tiny) apartment, take the train to Busan, stay there, fly to Jeju Island, take the ferry back to the mainland, and take the train from whichever was the furthest south ‘main’ train depot back to Seoul.
This face, I assure you, was at the notion of sleeping on my couch. And not from the smell in my apartment.
The first part of the trip went ‘normally’, insofar as such things are possible for two men who have known each other for almost 30 years to go normally in another country. Picking him up from the train station was complicated, if only because cell service is hard to come by for international travelers.
There was of course to be lots of food on this excursion.
We spent part of the first whole day in and around the train station to Busan. Got American breakfast (I REALLY wanted bacon and french toast that morning) after going to my beloved Gorae film lab, and then hopped on the train.
We naturally had to watch the (excellent) film Train to Busan while on the train to Busan.
Busan itself was a weird and wonderful place. Few things to keep in mind:
I brought film with us. 3 black and white (all HP5, and I was already in the middle of one) and an assortment of color- Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax. I had picked a film lab in Busan to drop off whatever rolls I’d shot before moving on to Jeju Island (mostly to not be afraid of losing the film).
We’d called an audible already- Jamie wanted some more time on Jeju and correctly pointed out it’d be easier to fly from Busan to Jeju as opposed to taking the ferry.
It was VERY smokey in this part of Korea at the time, there was a large wildfire close enough to us that the smoke was drifting downward, and I’m not good at hiking. That informs the next slide deck (pics of the only hike I actually did).
editor’s note: a LOT of pictures I have of Jamie ended up of him talking to other people. Another tick in the ‘he lives life larger than I do’ list: he didn’t let language barriers get in the way of meeting new people.
This was a long-exposure view of Busan on a smokey evening. Shot on HP5 and developed in an unknown developer by a lab whose name I don’t remember.
That hike was REALLY hard on me. Not that I was out of shape, not even because of the smoke (as you will soon see, Jamie is a smoker), I don’t know why. All I know (read: remember) is that before this hike I’d spoken idly of joining my friend on his volcano hike on Jeju. After this? No chance.
“We should probably take a pic together for our moms.” - Jamie
“That’s cool. Let me meter for the highlights outside!” - Me, probably
Because of our ‘delay’, though, we still had a whole day more in Busan than we were expecting. Which was exciting for Jamie (a foodie) and for me (a photographer), because it meant more to see… specifically in Busan’s open-air fish market.
Dear reader, we ate that octopus maybe ten minutes later.
One of my least favorite parts of myself is the degree to which I’m not adventurous when it comes to eating. Jamie knew this, but he made me promise that I’d try the same level of ‘out there’ things that he did. (Later he’d eat really hot meat, which he graciously allowed me and my ‘diet coke is just a little too spicy’ self to pass on.) I agreed, because I knew this would be good for me.
Eating raw octopus was wild. I’d had it cooked already (wasn’t a fan), but having it raw was just different.
(Reader- it did wiggle on its way down a little bit.)
Next up? The Busan Air Cruise aka “cable cars”.
Most of the following was shot on a roll of Kodak Gold 200.
One of the best parts about traveling with old friends is how you know each others’ rhythms. Did we get on each others’ nerves? Yes absolutely. But, just as I knew how important the hiking was to Jamie, he knew me getting scenic stuff to photograph was important to me. And he made sure to point out when he saw shots that were worthwhile. Which was GREATLY appreciated.
I had finished up the roll of Kodak Gold and then put in HP5 number 2 when we had landed on the other side.
After we’d returned (see last pic on the grid), I posted up with the tripod I’d carried around all day with my camera, an ND filter (I think, but honestly don’t remember), and a shutter release cable. Had a few snaps left on HP5 first.
This one is a favorite. 5 second exposure I believe?
Worth noting before I get to the next set of pics: this is (hopefully) the last set of pictures where I bemoan ‘ah I didn’t save the negatives!’.
I definitely had more pics I wanted to take of the cable cars. I noticed that the bottom of each car that was suspended over the water had lights that went through the visible light spectrum. I also had an idea.
What was almost a stranger experience than eating raw octopus was taking (most of) these rolls to a lab I would literally never walk into again. It was the ultimate leap of faith- recognizing that the images I’d taken were entirely in someone else’s hands. Which, I’ll grant, is part of the fun and thrill of film photography*. But when it’s pictures that I just have that feeling about, it makes it all the more difficult to even consider. But then, I didn’t have a choice.
The street behind our hotel room on Jeju Island
The rest of the trip (and Jamie’s time, of course) had fewer notable photo shoots on my part. Plenty of it was spent walking around places, eating good food (mostly black pork), and me cheering him on from a distance as he proceeded to hike a gosh-damned volcano.
Made time for some 15-minute long exposures (with a 10-stop ND filter) though, of course.
And then it was waiting to get my HP5 shots back from the film lab in Busan. And as you can see above- well worth the wait. The more intense grain on the HP5 though, even when it wasn’t a long-exposure, is what first keyed me in to the knowledge that not every film lab develops black and white film the same way. Whereas I personally use Kodak’s D-76, the lab I go to in Tacoma uses Ilfosol-3, and others use different ones. It adds a little spice- a little excitement into the game of finding out if the light landed correctly on your little piece of gelatin and silver.
Above: a carousel of images taken after we returned from Jeju. Some glowy long-exposures from a subway tunnel included.
Street photography is weird. But where black and white can allow you to just focus on the subjects and the light- color film forces you to consider the spectrum of said light. And I’d spent a lot of time in Seoul (and before, and after) not really considering how a particular film stock responded to whatever light I was encountering. After this trip, I began to do that more.
Wrapping-up thoughts:
I did take the roll of Ultramax 400 with the long-exposures of the cable cars to Gorae Film Lab back in Seoul- I knew that if the images somehow turned out remotely close to what I imagined, I’d want to scan them myself.
It bears repeating- I intentionally kept those negatives but then chose to discard them sometime between the Busan trip and the time of this blog’s writing.
Color film is complicated now because printing in a darkroom is not a complex process (to me), with black and white film. So when I take a really good color image, it just pains me to think about how prohibitive color darkroom printing is. It’s, in its own way, forcing me into shooting more black and white. And also being more intentional about when and where to shoot color.
There are plenty of stories about our time in Busan and on Jeju island that I didn’t tell in this blog. Again, I wanted to tie it to the subject matter of said blog.
Upcoming arts markets:
if you are reading this before June 7th 2026, come to my booth at the next Tacoma Sunday Market! Sunday, June 7th. I’ll be there selling as Aaron D Leach Photography.
Also the Columbia City Night Market is Saturday, June 20th, from 6-10pm.
And if you’re reading it after June 7th, I’ll certainly be posting about more markets.