Metallic Lambda Prints

A couple of weekends ago I visited the Art Warehouse - part of a week of special art displays in Rotterdam, in layers of (supposed) sophistication starting with Art Rotterdam in the cruise terminal, Raw art and then the Art Warehouse in the old port warehouses.


This year I did not visit the main Art Rotterdam exhibition, in recent years I have found this too unusual ( allegedly avant-garde) for my taste.
Many of the items in this exhibition I find impossible to like or understand, as well as wondering who can afford to pay thousands of Euros for a piece of art which looks to me like it was made by a careless 2 year old, as well as wondering who would have the nerve to put these items in the exhibition in the first place.
Even in the Warehouse there was one wall hanging maybe 3 meters by 2 meters high, which looked as though it was made from old cardboard boxes which had been torn up, glued together and painted brown.   Maybe its just my lack of artistic understanding but for a few thousand Euros I just don't get it.

I do like that you sometimes find some very high quality work displayed in a new way.

Which was why I was looking at some very high gloss images displayed in the Art Warehouse which were described on the name plates as metallic lambda aluminum dibond prints.  The pictures looked great but I did not know what this print system involved.

Back home and checking on the internet I found some confusing descriptions but this seems the most complete,

- Lambda printing, or LightJet printing, produces the highest quality photographic prints available for large format printing display graphics from digital artwork. Whether the prints are onto photographic paper, film or Duratrans, Lambda printing gives sharp photographic images, continuous tone and high-impact color photographic prints. Lambda is the name and common reference to the process, equipment and product which has taken over from the traditional photographic process.

Lambda printing gives the highest resolution display graphics on the market today for high-impact trade show and retail displays or essentially anywhere that the highest quality and resolution is required. Using continuous tone digital technology, photographic display graphics are produced by transferring images directly from computer generated digital files to reflective or backlit photographic materials without the need of a negative. Within the equipment, there are three lasers, red, green and blue, which are merged into a single beam that simultaneously exposes the photographic material, producing the image in a single pass. The photographic material is then processed in the same manner as traditional photography by developing the photographic material in a "wet" film processor. By using the lasers, the total image is crisp and precise edge to edge, with no distortion. All of this means that the quality of a Lambda print will be much better in terms of clarity, sharpness and in color saturation than other large format printing processes.

In simple terms you seem to end up with a very high quality photographic print bonded between 2 sheets of high gloss plexiglass or a sheet of aluminum and plexiglass. This creates an extremely high gloss looking picture, and needs a very complicated looking machine to make.

Not every image would look good printed this way but for some subjects it clearly adds a very sophisticated finish. These were all big pictures of more than 1 metre wide so already quite striking and selling for high amounts in the 5 to 10 thousand Euros each.

The most interesting thing was that a lot of these of photographs were not of real subjects , that is you could not just take these with a camera, rather they were composed of many cut outs of other images, built together in many layers in a kind of a digital collage. Sometimes you could tell this in the image immediately, in others the manipulation only became apparent after you had been looking for sometime, very cleverly done because once you saw it -  then the technique was suddenly apparent all over the image, leaving me surprised that I had not seen it straight away.

I took a few sneaky pictures with my iPhone when the security staff where looking the other way, but although the pictures are ok they are not able to bring out the detail and depth of the originals. I include some website images and links so you can go and look yourself at some better versions and some more of their images


Ysabel Lemay

These were truly stunning images giving a depth of image and subtly which is impossible to describe in words, made from multiple layers of image these appeared absolutely true to life but as you looked you could see things which could not possibly be there in a simple photograph

Copyright Ysabel Lemay

Joseph Klibansky.

In these images the technique is more apparent - but only once you spot what's going on - looks like its a typical if rather busy street scene somewhere in Asia, but as you look closely you realize that the plants on the front of  the building are actually pictures of houseplants over-layed on the front of the building.

Copyright Joseph Klibansky

Christian Voight

Christian's pictures were more real life subjects (at least I think so !)  shown in a different way, the depth of feel and color in these images is amazing. The sample image is a shop / market stall in the middle east but if you look on his web site there are some really fantastic images of sand dunes in the dessert - take a look and just try and imagine these printed 2 meters wide

Copyright Christian Voight

I am now looking for a print shop where I can have one or two of my brighter images printed in this style.

Footnote - I have used some images whose copyright is owned by others to illustrate my admiration of their work, and in the hope that you will also like it and go and look at their websites
  

Posted with Blogsy

Blipfoto and cold weather

A few days ago I had to close down my little local exhibition, my photos have now been replaced by some oil paintings by a local artist.

No sales during the exhibition though it seems there were quite a lot of viewers, maybe the price is too high but there is not much left out of my pricing once you include the cost of making and framing the print, and excluding any time element.

The cold weather continues in the Netherlands, snow on the ground all week which has created some nice photo opportunities.

I have been using these shots on Blipfoto, my daily photo journal. I started this on the first of January so I have now 26 photos on this site, seemed easy to just take a photo every day but it is sometimes really difficult to find both the time, well more the right moment, and the right shot.  The website checks the dates in the photo information from your camera, so you have to take the photo on the correct day.

I want to try and only add good quality images so i build a good looking record of where I went and what I did throughout the year.

So far I have a mix of photos from my Sony camera and my iPhone -  you can see the whole set at..
http://www.blipfoto.com/Bizonderimage

Some of the photos caused severe freezing of my hands, I cannot quite work the camera with my gloves on, and at one point my hands were so cold I could no longer push the button on the camera.

I also have a few shots which did not make the cut for Blipfoto this week.

Ducks at the Marina

Sunrise Panorama

Heron in the garden in the snow

  

Looking ahead 2013

Here I am back from an extended blog break as a result of Christmas and a very busy work schedule at the start of the year.

This year I decided not to make any New Year Resolutions, in the past I had all the usual plans, lose weight, get fit, exercise very day, eat less and more healthily, drink less and so it goes on. I would start the year with grandiose improvement plans which would have all stopped or failed within a few weeks, sometimes leaving me a bit depressed by my apparent lack of will power.

It seems I meet exactly the remark of one of the characters in the Oscar Wilde comedy play Lady Windermere's Fan, " I can resist anything except temptation"

By the way when I was checking exactly where this saying came from i discovered a lot of other good quotes from this play
- you can read them at  -
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1897835-lady-windermere-s-fan  

At least so far I have stuck to my "no resolution" almost exactly.

Anyone who has been following my blog will recall that a few months ago I started a collection of photographs taken out of my Hotel room window whenever I was travelling. As my job takes me all over Europe I have lots of opportunities for this collection.

Well this year I have taken this a step further by joining a website called Blipfoto, which allows you to upload just one single photograph each day, with the aim to have a photograph each day. This has two impacts, both to create a record of the year but also to make you think all the time what your photograph can be today, so you end up always looking for things to photograph.

Yesterdays photo is below and if you are interested you can find the others at....http://www.blipfoto.com/Bizonderimage

 It was incredibly cold and quite windy when I took this photo, the display in my car said -5C but AccuWeather on my iPad gave a 'realfeel" temperature of -15C, taking one of my gloves off to adjust the camera settings left me with very very cold and painful fingers in just a few moments. 

Of course I took a few photos during my Christmas break, I have one I particularly like taken at Alcock Tarn just above Grasmere in the UK Lake District.

I like it because I think it shows the true nature of the Lake District, nice view across the Tarn with Lake Windermere in the background, raining but with the sun trying to break through, family out walking stopping to check the map.
 

It also makes an interesting black and white photograph showing how this same image has been created again and again over the years

 

Looking at things differently

Christmas is a family time and for us this year meant a visit back to the UK for Christmas with my daughter and her soon to be husband, combined on the Saturday before Christmas with the wedding of my nephew Christopher and his new wife Amy.

Chris and Amy had the great idea of photo challenge for the children, who they gave a disposable camera and a list of shots they had to collect, later in the evening I gave my Sony Nex 7 to my two young nephews of about 10 and 8 to go and take some shots.

They quickly filled the memory card(s) and used up the batteries but the results show a different way of thinking and looking at things. Of course there are some shots of the family and the guests at the wedding both in and out of focus but then there is a fascinating time lapse of one of the boys with a mask of a face on the back of his head and his waistcoat and tie on backwards walking up the stairs but looking as if he is coming down (or maybe the other way around - I don't know which way round they did it).

At midnight on Christmas Eve we went to the Christmas service at York Minster, a strange mixture of very busy with people but very calm in the way it all worked

I do not often watch the TV during the day but being the holidays I found myself channel hopping on the TV and found a continuous looping of shows by Dynamo a UK based street magician who did some quite amazing and for me anyway bewildering tricks.

I made a strange mental connection while watching Dynamo and slowly realising this must be who my little nephew had been talking about a year ago when he visited me and attempted walking on water "like Dynamo" on the lake near where we stay

I had imagined he meant some new cartoon super hero but did not ask - of course not wanting to reveal my growing old age  ignorance of such things / people but now I realise that he meant this magician.

You can see some of his magic at www.dynamomagician.com

I think he can be best summed up by a quote I found on the Internet

After much consideration...…I have come to the conclusion that Dynamo is actually a wizard who is slowly revealing his powers to the world.

In among my Santa presents was a cardboard 'make it your self' film pin hole camera which has taken me hours to build but is now ready for its first shot

 I also now have an infrared filter, I have seen some beautiful infra red photographs but my first shot using this filter is not too impressive. The top red image is direct form the camera, the black and white image has been cleaned up but only on my ipad

Hope to be able to include some better images in future blogs.

Today we took a chance with the weather which is alternating between light rain and very heavy rain with brief periods of very cold hailstones a bit wet for photographs apart from a few opportunities between the showers

We walked from Grasmere up to Alcock Tarn, but following our normal route backwards - the shot below is from just below Alcock tarn looking over Windermere

Shot below is looking across Alcock Tarn, with a young family silhouetting across the light, cheerful and lively despite the rainy weather (still needs a bit of levelling adjustment)

Posted with Blogsy

Low Lights and High Lights

 Another Tragic Moment

Yesterday morning I woke to the news of the Sandy Hook School shooting where a 20 year old has killed his mother, 6 other adults and 20 children mostly girls aged between 6 and 7 in a shooting massacre.

Words cannot express my horror at yet another one of these mindless, pointless incidents which not only destroys the lives of the people killed but also devastates their families friends and many others.

When and how will we be able to stop forever anyone from committing this kind of crazy crime?






On a brighter note much of my spare time this week has been spent putting my pictures together for my small exhibition.

I have only (!) ten pictures with a split between colour and black and white, all in similar frames so there is a consistent look. It is surprising how much time and effort is needed to frame up ten photos so they look complete and professional.

The next question is how to price them in case someone is tempted to buy. There is a cost of course to the printing and framing. I also have prices on my web site but selling success there has been remarkably small ( actually zero so far but you never know!! )

Its never quite clear why there is the lack of sales ( and I know I am not alone in this question). Of course the photographs may not be good enough, or the prices too high, but more i think it is that the market is simply saturated. Too many people and too many photographs ! Even the successful landscape and art photographers are saying that surviving and making a living just from selling photographs is increasingly difficult, and you also need to profit from Internet advertising, calendars, workshops and so on.

So i think my prices have to be a bit lower than on the website, but still at a level that gives some credibility and profit.

This is a bit how they look finished off with a light almost white mount mat and solid black frames.

So now I am waiting for the buyers to call.................  and probably still waiting next week.......

Tonight I visited the China Light Festival in Rotterdam. I have watched this being built in the park next to my office for the last few weeks. Its open from now until February so this may just be my first of a few visits.

Not surprising to see a lot of people with cameras but unusually a lot of people with tripods. Also a lot of people trying to photograph the lights with the camera flash still turned on. I think they would be amazed how much better their photos could look if they just spent an hour learning some basics from their camera manual.

Trying to photograph the laser light show was the most interesting and difficult. The electronic view finder on the camera revealed light pulses in the laser which you could not see just with your eyes, and the light is moving so fast that the lines become blurs and waves in the pictures - so which is lying ? the camera or your eyes? 

Posted with Blogsy

Life, Death, and photography

For me the news this week includes two rather tragic events

The first involves the newly announced pregnancy of Kate Middleton, wife to the future King of England, and whose child will also be King or Queen of England in the future.

She was admitted to hospital suffering from morning sickness, unpleasant perhaps but not uncommon for pregnant women the world over.
As a joke an Australian radio show called the hospital pretending to be the Queen and managed to get some personal information from one of the nurses on duty.

The tragedy of the situation only becomes clear a few days later when the hospital nurse who answered the call was found dead, apparently by suicide.

She was married with two children, just imagine how stupid, desperate, and lonely she must have felt, a joke in front of the whole world where she was an unwilling victim.

I'm sure the radio show hosts who pulled this prank are also devastated by this outcome, but does the fact they started this joke also make them responsible for this suicide?
As their boss is quoted as saying - no-one could reasonably foresee this outcome as a result of a pretty common bit of radio comedy.

The second tragic event has been all over the news in the photography world.

A man was pushed off the platform in a New York subway station by a homeless mentally ill person.

A professional photographer took this photograph just before the train hit and killed the person who had been pushed. The big debate is whether he should have taken a photograph or tried to save the man. The photographer claims he was trying to attract the attention of the train driver with the flash on his camera. What would you have done?

For me I would like to think I would have tried to help, but the reality is that this all happened in a space of about 20 seconds, and in the shock of the moment none of us can know for sure what they would or could have done. 

You can also question if the photographer should have submitted the photo to a newspaper, or if the newspaper should have published the photograph, especially with this headline

But in the end neither the photographer or the newspaper are responsible for this death, that was caused by the homeless person, or the lack of provision of a guard wall commonly seen in this type of rail system.

And remember too that if the man had pulled himself back onto the platform in time,  the photographer would be in with a chance for a best news photo of the year prize.

On a brighter note I am preparing some of my photographs for a small exhibition in one of the shop windows in the small town in the Netherlands where I live.  The lady who owns the shop has a running exhibition of local peoples art - some good, sometimes not so good. Interesting to see what reaction I get to the show.

I am planning a mix of colour and black and white photographs, some taken in England and some taken in the Netherlands - a little taster of the images below.

Posted with Blogsy

Dutch Christmas tradition

One of the big differences between England and the Netherlands is the whole tradition around Christmas.

The Christian religion elements are the same but the traditions around giving and receiving presents, and the story around Father Christmas, also known as Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas is different.

From my childhood in England, I know that Father Christmas lives with his wife in the North Pole and for most of the year supervises a large team of Elves in a toy making workshop. Each Christmas Eve he loads his sleigh with toys, and pulled by a team of reindeer delivers the toys to children around the world.

You can write to him to explain what you would like to receive, but to be honest my attempts at this were not very successful so I am still waiting for many of my childhood wish list items to be delivered. Each year I hope he will have found my letters hidden in his workshop or fallen behind a workbench but so far no luck.

In the Netherlands the children explain to me that Sinterklaas actually lives in Spain, where he also spends most of the year making presents assisted by his helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). A few weeks before Christmas he sets off from Spain in a boat ( a steamship usually) arriving in The Netherlands at the bargaining of December. On the 5th of December the children leave out their clogs or shoes for Sinterklaas to fill with presents and sweets. The 6th December is of course the feast day of St Nicholas.

Sinterklaas does not look like Santa Claus, but has a more religious appearance. According to wikipedia and other reliable sources both are based on Saint Nicholas of Myra, who was a 4th century Greek Christian Bishop of Myra (now called Demre) in Turkey. In his role as Sinterklaas in the Netherlands St Nicholas is portrayed as a bearded bishop in canonical robes.

The surprising thing though is not Sint himself but his helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) because this seems out of place in todays world.

As part of the celebrations and build up to Christmas, many people dress up as Zwarte Piet and parade in the towns dressed in bright clothing, and with black make up on their faces and arms, distributing peppernotten ( a small biscuit type sweet) to the children.

Many of the young children in the crowds, or even just shopping with their parents have Piet style outfits and even a few of them can always be found with blackened faces.

I cannot think of any other occassions when it would be felt appropriate to have people made up in black make up.

Every year there are articles in the news about this issue and the accusation of racism in this tradition, but most of my Dutch colleagues see this as harmless fun, and few of them recognise this as being offensive in any way.

Dutch people both collectively and individually are socially tolerant and responsible. The Netherlands is home to many foreign and immigrant people, and overall the country appears well integrated and largely free of any racial tension.

The arrival of Sint and Piet is a happy event with everyone enjoying themselves.


For myself, I live in the Netherlands and I respect their social customs and norms, but all the same I still find it a bit strange to watch the Festive parades involving people "blacked up" as Sint's helpers.

However a bit of wikipedia style research also reveals that English Santa is not quite what he seems and over the years has been enhanced mega-botox style

Before the 1930's Santa was pictured in many ways as a bishop as in The Netherlands, tall man, thin man, chief elf and more. His coat started as brown and over some years changed to red.

His current more fat and jolly image has much of its roots in Coca Cola advertising starting from the 1920s

The Coca-Cola Company began its Christmas advertising in the 1920s with shopping-related ads in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. The first ads used a rather strict-looking Santa Claus.

In 1930, artist Fred Mizen painted a department-store Santa in a crowd drinking a bottle of Coke. (You have to remember that there were no computers or any of the modern image manipulation techniques such as Photoshop, which we take for granted today)

In 1931 Coca-Cola ads appeared in popular magazines, they wanted to picture a version of Santa that was both realistic and symbolic. As in any advertising campaign the image had to be memorable but also positive about the brand.

An illustrator caled Haddon Sundblom developed advertising images based upon a poem description of Santa as warm, friendly, and pleasantly plump.

So our modern fat jolly Santa seems to have more to do with Coca Cola than any other traditional image.

Posted with Blogsy