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)

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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? 

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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.

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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.

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Old cameras, modern landscape

A few weeks ago I visited the Foto museum in Rotterdam and while I was there I picked up a leaflet for a club called Fotografica. This was advertising a market for old cameras which I then went to last weekend near Utrecht

Absolutely amazing, a large exhibition hall filled with cameras and equipment covering about the whole history of photography from old wooden large format cameras, folding cameras, film SLRs right up to ( almost ) current models and recent lenses.

 

There were many dealers from Germany and shoppers seemingly from all over Europe. I was tempted by some of the large format cameras, many landscape and architectural photographers are still using this equipment but the prices were too high without more research and knowledge of what I was buying.

In the end I bought a smaller folding camera for a small amount of money. This is branded as coming from Eka Fotowerke but an Internet search reveals nothing about this name or model.

These cameras are very rudimentary and slow, you first focus your image onto a glass focusing screen at the back of the camera, then you slide out the back and slide in a sheet of film in a light protective holder. Once inside the camera you open the film slide and then take the photograph by manually opening and timing the shutter. Surprising that anything turns out at all.

I did not manage to get any film slides and as the make is not findable on the Internet i may not be able to progress with this camera. Looks like i may need more research and a visit to the next market to buy a different model.

I had my small but really great Sony NEX7 camera with me, the more i use this camera the more i get to like it. After the market we went to Utrecht for a look around, first stopping off in a cafe for some coffee. During the walk my wife asked me to photo a picture in the window of a gallery, i then realised I had left the Sony on the chair in the cafe. Luckily after 15 minutes rapid and slightly nervous walk back to the cafe we found the camera right where I had left it. Quite a compliment that the camera is so light that you don't notice that you are carrying it, but with the downside that you also don't notice when you are no longer carrying it !

During the week I went to a talk by a Dutch photographer Hans Wilschut.  Some good stories about where he had been to take some of these images, but also a different take on photographing cities, and the impact they have on people, and impact of the people in the cities.

You can see these on his website at www.hanswilschut.com but I particularly liked some of the buildings shots showing the people through the windows - who obviously did not know they where being photographed, and also his installation within the Rotterdam port building where the are set up to look like they are a continuation of the office corridor into areas of the port. Very clever use of depth and perspective

Home or away

I seem to have been very busy recently, so I am falling behind both in writing these notes but also in submitting the assignments for my photo course.  This weekend I plan to catch up on everything.

This has not been helped I have also had a serious problem with my home WiFi network, which simply stopped working correctly so I had to spend some time trying to work this out.  Our system had a simple router and a repeater (our house has concrete walls which seem to eat the signal) First the repeater stopped, so I bought a new one, which then turned out to be an extender not a repeater - so an apparently simple problem got bigger and bigger - so here I am with a whole new system - which seems to have solved the problems at last. Except my backup system is now not working properly. Why is that once one part of my computer system breaks, as I fix one bit another bit seems to break. I suspect that this could be my lack of computer competency shining through...

At last work is starting to calm down travel wise, Just one trip to London last week, but interestingly one night staying in a hotel in my 'home' city of Rotterdam.

Its a bit obvious that you don't often stay in a hotel close to where you live - you just go home - who wouldn't.
But this week I had a good reason so stayed in a small boutique hotel called Pincoffs in Rotterdam
(www.hotelpincoffs.nl )  This was doubly interesting for me as we used to live in an apartment building only 100 metres away from this hotel while the original building was being redeveloped into a hotel.

Unknown to me at the time was that the development was also the subject of a TV show about the dream of the owners to create a luxury hotel in Rotterdam   You can see a bit of this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aooKKECgJ-s

We worked in the hotel during the day and then went out for dinner, when we returned we found another TV show was being filmed in the Hotel at that moment -  A famous Dutch actor (or maybe presenter) - who of course I did not recognise and even after shaking his hand in the bar I have no clue of his name or why he is famous  - was making film about the homeless in Rotterdam at Christmas ( homeless in Dutch is Dakloos - literally 'roof less' )

Rotterdam has a nice skyline at night which was clear from the window.

 

Erasmus Bridge Rotterdam

The latest part of my photo course has been about exposure and rescuing photographs, this has taken me a long time to do and it is a bit strange deliberately taking bad photos so you can save them later. Some turned out OK but the real lesson is that a bad photo usually stays bad whatever you do

I did have one very frightening moment, I had agreed with our neighbour in our rented house in Grasmere that I could walk down his fields to the lake to take some photographs.  By the lake in a little corner of a fenced off field there was an old boat which had filled with water, and on the morning I visited was just covered with ice, and from the corner of my eye i saw there was a small body trapped in the ice - for a heart stopping moment I thought it was a child, but luckily it was just a big doll someone had left there - for me a very rather scary experience. You can just see the doll peeping out of the boat in the next photo, and below that a rescued photograph of Grasmere village

  

How nature changes in a week

Autumn is a great time for taking photographs, the trees show magnificent colors, the dawn is not too early, in the right places there can often be early morning mist which transforms the landscape into a magical unrecognizable place.

It can sometimes be cold, wet and uninviting to get up and go out early in the morning with my camera, but always it proves worth the effort as the sun starts to rise and light breaks through revealing what the day will really be like, the low sun, still water and changing leaf colours provide some great reflections and picture opportunities   

Unfortunately it is also one of our busiest times at work as we prepare plans and budgets for the coming year, this involves a lot of travel, dinners and late nights.

However I have manged to squeeze into my schedule 2 consecutive weekends in Grasmere, my wife stayed the full week, I took a little trip to Dubai in the meantime.

What really came home was how much the landscape changed in that single week.  The trees changed from being full of beautiful colored leaves to being at least half bare with the leaves lying on the ground, the weather had been dry (and windy) so the carpet of leaves was now dry and heading more towards brown than red, another week and I think the beauty of autumn will be over.

  

Living behind a gate

The Big Event since the last update was my daughter getting married - great event and a great day if a little strange from a photography perspective as I naturally my attention was focused on my daughter and not on my camera - so I will rely on the photographs from the official photographer and the other guests

Regular followers and friends will know that my job takes me all over the world and last week after the wedding I went straight to Durban in South Africa, 

Of course being there only a few days while working does not give you much feel for the country but there are clear concerns about personal safety and security in that you have to be aware of where you are and what you are doing.  During the day and in the city it seems like any other big city, but there are clearly places you would not venture to at night or by yourself.

What did strike me is how it is accepted that many (if not most) of the people who I met where living in gated estates or gated homes, with 24 hour security.  Everyone just seemed to accept that is how it needs to be but I am not sure I could be happy living that way.

Gated Entrance to the small hotel where we were staying

I have had no time to work on my course but my continual work travel has started me on a photography project where I am trying to take a picture out of the window wherever I am staying each night. 

So here's a few of the batch I have already after only 2 weeks or so......

Room 5 Thornton Hall Hotel Heswall UK

Kirstens House York UK

Room 10122 P&O Ferry Hull Rotterdam

LH 999 @ Amsterdam Netherlands

Room 9 Auberge Hollandaise Durban South AFrica

LH7335 @ Johannesburg South Africa