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.

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

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

Racing Dragons

Spent a weekend at my future son in laws stag party.  Great time drinking English beer in an old brewery, kart racing, vomiting friends- perfect weekend given the event.

Brewery was full of all kinds of old machinery, some had been replaced by modern equivalents but actually the whole process seemed remarkably simple - if not to say even a bit hit and miss - although the beer was all good

 

My Dutch colleagues were amazed I was joining - said that if they joined the equivalent Dutch bachelor party then the wedding would be cancelled as the future husband would surely prove unworthy of their precious daughter.  I am now intrigued to join one of these bachelor parties - just for cultural research of course.

Although the weekend was in the Lake District unfortunately there was no time for landscape viewing or photographing, although I did manage some karting action, maintaining my personal record of always finishing in last place.  Most people seem to improve during the heats building up towards the final race, I on the other hand always start well and then get steadily worse.

Last weekend at last the sun came out so we could at least step outside without a coat.

I was trying to photograph some pictures for my wife - this posed a big problem as they are mounted behind glass and there were more reflections than picture. In the end I had to make a temporary studio by wrapping lack cloth around the picture, the camera and me - must have looked like some kind of photography vampire. Eventually got a quite good picture

Holidays coming up soon so I am thinking of what lenses I might need - I generally use a sigma 18 - 200 zoom - but after doing some analysis of my previous photos using a snazzy little piece of software called automator on my mac, its clear most of my photos are at the low end of this zoom so I am looking at the canon 17-55 lens. As usual this gets mixed reviews, and having read about people being paid to write reviews its hard to know what or who you can trust on the internet.

Maybe see some photo results here after the summer....