How long are your shoelaces ?

How long are your shoelaces

When I put my shoes (trainers) on this morning I noticed that one of the laces was looking a bit thin and ready to break. I was going out shopping so easy to get a new pair, but how long did I need - the ends of the laces were already frayed so I did not want to take the laces out to measure them so of course I asked the internet - thinking I would just get some average lengths or similar - Instead a found a web site which can tell you everything you could ever need to know about laces - and some more as well. you can see it here -  Shoelace website

Not just what length you need but also more ways of lacing your shoes than I knew existed

So after a bit of calculation off I went to the shop -
and typically found they did have any suitable laces anyway !
  














Yesterday I visited the Hand Made exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam
This was a great exhibition with a wide range of objects on display, from hundreds of years ago right up to today.

 These were some of my favorites, on the left a knitted or crocheted pair of people, and on the right a imitation of a under sea coral made from pottery and woven steel wire.    












There is also a live demonstration of crafts which changes each week, yesterday there was a person painting trays and things in what I think of as canal boat style, and a demonstration of taxidermy.  This did not sound too attractive but in fact it looked more like making cuddly toys out of animal skins rather than putting their cleaned bones back together

 

You can have a look at the museum web site Here

Panorama of the week 

I was on a business trip to Sweden this week and to get back I went on the train from Malmo in Sweden to Copenhagen Airport in Denmark. 

The Öresund Bridge is a double-track railway and dual carriageway bridge-tunnel across the Øresund strait between Scania (southernmost Sweden) and Denmark.

The bridge runs nearly 8 km (5 miles) from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm, which lies in the middle of the strait. The remainder of the link is by a 4 km (2.5 mile) tunnel from Peberholm to the Danish island of Amager.

The Øresund Bridge is the longest combined road and rail bridge in Europe, and connects two major metropolitan areas: Copenhagen, the Danish capital city, and the major Swedish city of Malmö. It connects the road and rail networks of Scandinavia with those of Central and Western Europe.

When you are on the bridge you cannot see much but the sea and horizon in the distance and the steel work of the bridge flashing past the window. Using my iPhone to try and take a panorama produced the image below which is a chopped up version of the bridge which gives a modern art or abstract image.

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

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

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

  

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

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 !

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.