I recently picked up an assignment to write and shoot a travel article on night markets for Australian newspaper The Saturday Paper. The main part of the story is set at Keelung’s Miaokou Night Market.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/life/travel/2026/04/18/food-memory-taiwans-night-markets

If you’d like to read the article, you can do by registering, which will allow you to read it for free.

If you can’t be bothered doing that, here’s the first paragraph:

“Night markets are where Taiwan’s spiritual, culinary and social lives coalesce. Spared China’s Cultural Revolution, the island maintained its spiritual, predominantly Taoist, traditions. Today, Taiwan has the world’s highest density of places of worship, and the surrounding lanes are as fascinating as the temples themselves.”

If you’re a photographer in Taipei, it’s impossible to miss the city’s night markets. They’ve also been on my mind recently after watching Left-handed Girl, by Shih-Ching Tsou. I thought it was pretty good, but it would have been so much better to look at if she got the budget to shoot the movie on film. As it is, the film was shot on iPhone. It’s amazing what you can do with iPhones, but when I was watching the movie, I often found myself picking out shots with an ‘iPhone look’, which is so ubiquitous these days, it’s boring. For a quick digression, I saw The Secret Agent, which from the first frame I could tell was shot on film. Man, that movie just looks fantastic.

It is relatively easy to get Kodak Vision 3 motion picture film in Taipei, loaded into 35mm canisters. Night markets are great to shoot on it since they are are nice and bright with varied light temperatures.

Nevertheless, I shot the main photo for The Saturday Paper assignment on a Nikon Z6II with a 40mm lens, mainly for convenience.

I’ve thrown in some bonus film photos of various night markets shot with a Hasselblad Xpan with Kodak Vision 3 500T.