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A few days ago I had to close down my little local exhibition, my photos have now been replaced by some oil paintings by a local artist.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

  

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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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 !

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.