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.

  

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 !

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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