I have a confession to make - well some explaining to do at least: I recently spent some time using a digital camera. I have a legitimate reason for this. One that is rather irrelevant at this point. Either way. I needed to practice using one. Now, I'm not a particularly big fan of digital cameras; I think they are needlessly complicated sometimes, and I hate autofocus, and yes I am sure you can get around it, but I am not inclined to learn this malarky when I have perfectly good film cameras.
Anyway. Thanks to some rather fancy technology, you can get these little extension bits to digital cameras (some of them at least) and mount manual lenses onto them. As I have mentioned I use an old Olympus OM-1 as my default camera (I actually also use an OM-2, but that's also another story, for another blog post - most likely the next one). I have the use of an Olympus Pen, which is a pretty nice bit of kit. But as it stands I can whack on my OM lenses to the Pen. So this post consists of digital images that I have taken recently (my first actual attempt being some random shots of Shanghai from ages and ages ago when I felt like a wander about the city - but that was a pokey little camera that I was also trying to get used to using).
I went down to Suzhou for the day. It's very picturesque, lots of things to see. I went mainly to see some rather elaborate gardens and a water village, but I managed to get a chance to go around a silk factory. Silk Factory No. 1 as it is somewhat formally known. It's rated as the best in China, and as China is rather famous for it's silk, it's a pretty big deal. Now as I wasn't originally planning on going to see this place, I was somewhat uninclined to use up the films that I was carrying, so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to try out this digital camera, since I had brought it along anyway. I was also using a 50mm lens, also something that I haven't actually used a whole lot of in the past year. My first blog post with pictures is the only other example of my using a 50mm wide angle lens. I had found it a strange lens to get used to, and was more interested in using my 35-135mm and 35-70mm which are basically my two standard lenses I use all the time for obvious reasons. Anyway. What follows are some images of me wandering about a small factory and what I saw, using a camera I was not used to, and a lens I was not used to either. The title of this post will make sense.
So silk is quite interesting stuff. The way it is farmed is just as interesting. Here a woman is sorting cocoons, separating bad ones from the good ones.
After they are separated they are put in hot water and the threads attached to these things that run it all together in spools. You can't really see what the woman is holding, but trust me she is holding a bit of silk. Did you know silk is actually just silkworm vomit? Well pretty much. The cocoon is the silk and the silkworm is killed before it turns into a moth.
The thread that comes out of a silk worm is one single piece and can be more than 1000 metres (yes, one kilometre) in length. Eight strands of silk are wound together to make one thread since one alone is too thin (this is a very basic run down of the procedure, but it's interesting nonetheless).
Moving away from hands for the minute, but this is a cool image.
The main area where the threads are run into spools is quite a long room with a lot of people working on them at one time.
Also a cool picture. Tools make things work too.
This is a woman opening up the cocoon and getting rid of the larvae. They stretch out the opened cocoon once it has softened in the water. The strange thing standing up is what the silk is stretched over.
This is a better view.
They move it from a smaller one, to a larger one seen here.
Larvae from the cocoon.
After it's all dried and and spooled, they make all sorts of things, here four women are stretching it from something that is about a foot squared, to something the size of a mattress.
And then made into the blankets... Silk is meant to be better for the lungs, and therefore better for sheets and covers and whatnot, due to the fact that it doesn't kick up dust the way cotton and feathers do.
I love these two photos together.
Fun in the work place it seems...
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