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.