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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Go out more, take less photographs

I am a member of "Images" an English speaking photography club in Den Haag in the Netherlands.

The club meets every month but I only attend occasionally as it always seems to coincide with some work commitment.

Last week was the first meeting after the summer, just before the meeting the chairperson asked for some volunteers to talk about a favorite photographer and show a few of their pictures.
I chose to talk about Joe Cornish and just showed a few pages from his website and talked a bit about why I liked his pictures.

You can see his web site for your self here  http://www.joecornishgallery.co.uk/

I spent a few days with Joe and another photographer called Richard Childs last year in the Lake District. ( http://www.richardchildsphotography.co.uk/ )

They taught me to think a lot more carefully about what picture I was trying to take, and to not get caught by the digital disease of taking 100 photographs in the hope that one will turn out to be a real winner.

So now I mostly have my camera on a tripod if I am being serious, and I take far less photographs.
(Although I do currently have about 65,000 photographs on my computer, covering a lot years.)

I could do with a good clear up but when I try this I only manage to delete a few hundred each time before I get fed up with the process but this hardly makes a dent in the total.    

Yesterday I was in the house and I became aware of a lot of noise outside the house - this turned out to be a massive flock of birds - starlings I think - there must have been thousands in the flock and they landed on the nearby trees and roofs.

Birds on the roof

I have seen this before at a nearby nature site, Kinderdijk, when the flocks get bigger and bigger as night approaches, with groups of birds flying in to join the main flock.

The site is famous for its large number of windmills - which are used as is common in the Netherlands for pumping water rather than milling grain

 

Mountain Lion problems and Dry Flowers

Back at work after the summer holidays and everything back in the same routine except that we have moved office from Europoort into the centre of Rotterdam.  To be honest I was not looking forward to the move, but actually it is really great, my travel time is about an hour less each day, and I don't face a major traffic jam every afternoon trying to get home.

The new office has a minimalist style -  everything completely in white, walls, desks, everything.
Its already nicknamed the apple store.

It has an surprisingly calming effect on everyone who works there - next Saturday is the open day for families plus a boat trip on the river Maas in the City and Port of Rotterdam.

After the holiday I updated my mac computer to the new Mountain Lion operating system - what a complete disaster - far from the usual Apple promise that "it just works" - I cannot keep one of our computers on the wireless network for more than about 15 minutes, this seems to be a widespread problem but no-one yet has discovered how to fix it - in the end I gave up and bought a wire and went back to the old way of just plugging it into the network.  At least now the computer stays connected but it does not really feel like progress.

On the next stage of my photo course - last week making photographs using depth of field effects (in and out of focus)  Technically not difficult but they introduce the idea of trying to pre-visualise what you wanted the picture to look like when it was finished.

This really makes you think about the photograph in a different way entirely

This is the full colour version
















But I think I prefer this black and white version

















This weeks exercise involved taking many photographs of a piece of grey card. Sounds a bit dull but really helps to understand what the camera is doing. All modern cameras start from the point that if you mixed together all the colours in your photographs then you would end up with a particular grey colour - in fact it adjust all the settings in your camera to ensure this is true.

So what you may think - just point and shoot - probably true but the next stage takes you into the so called zone system - originally invented by one of the greatest photographers of all time -
Ansel Adams - take a look at his photos here    www.anseladams.org

and here he is with his not so compact camera !

Back to the begining

 

Being on holiday I decided to try blogsy to write this weeks update. Unfortunately blogsy ate the first version, probably a mistake by me but I really don't know how it happened

Mixed holiday experience. Started with being sick all night on the ferry to England (food poisoning rather than sea sick) so much that I could not drive the car when we got to England. Lucky that after 2 years of refusing to drive my car Jane suddenly had the nerve to get us where we needed to be. Weather has also been mixed, mostly light rain mixed with heavy rain. Also took me a few days to recover so as a result both walking and photographing has been more limited than we hoped.

We did see a lot of our family which was really nice, and my nephew taught me to watch out for the wingless daddy longlegs which is of course the most poisonous thing on earth. ( lucky that he has weak fangs that cannot bite a tough person like me - the daddy long legs that is - not the nephew).

Both my sister and her two boys walked with us up to Easdale Tarn - a nice afternoon with no rain for a change but still enough water around to get the boys really soaked.

So bit of rain photography was needed........

 

 

 

Although the bridge made a nice photograph, by looking the other way you could see just how full the river was, overflowing onto an area which is normally a dry path.

Walking past the same spot the next day we found the water almost gone from the path and a group of artists sitting in the same spot sketching the bridge.

After the rain a lot of damage could be found all over the hills, with big landslides in some places, including a mini landslide across the main road into Keswick.

I have also started a course in photography from the Photography Institute in England. Online distance learning. Not sure if I need this or if it will improve my photographs but no harm in trying. Have done the first module, which dealt with lenses and cameras, and although I mostly already knew the material it was interesting to do the assignment which dealt with choosing what equipment you would take on different photo assignments

For the second assignment I have to photograph a household object - which is proving more difficult than it sounds to find something slightly interesting.

Back to work tomorrow.........

 

 

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Tunnels and Bright Lights

The Tour de France had to start without me last weekend but I did manage to cycle from my house in Rhoon to Delft about 30 Km away for lunch on Sunday.

This means having to cross the Maas river which splits Rotterdam into North and South. Being very cycle friendly all the bridges and tunnels have bike routes - so in this case we went through the cycle tunnel part of the Benelux Tunnel

Quite interesting getting in and out of the tunnel as you have to take your bike down and up a long escalator

 

So then to Dubai - for just one day - so more time in the plane than on the ground and not too much time for photos.  Dubai is a glitzy big city with plenty of bright lights best seen at night

But maybe more interestingly moody as a black and white picture

I have not always been a fan of black and white but some of my photographs taken in the early morning have so little colour anyway so I am more and more attracted to this area. 

Like for example below - which I think is far more like a rainy dawn than a coloured version could show.

But for some things you really need the color like these runner bean flowers in my garden this morning - in the warm rainy conditions they are doing really well.