Almost...

Autres directions

2011-10-25T23:32:00.000+02:00

Another one from the signs and symbols category.

Summer

2011-10-18T23:41:00.000+02:00

Autumn has begun and the last nights were quite cold already, so here's one from when it was still hot.

Piccadilly Circus

2011-10-15T18:31:00.001+02:00

A bus in London. While almost all photos I posted in the last months were very recent, this is a pretty old picture.

Crucifix

2011-10-06T22:12:00.001+02:00

There are lots of them in Brittany and this will certainly not be the last one I'll show here.

Basement stairs

2011-10-02T17:06:00.000+02:00

It seems my color period is about to end. At least for now - you never know...

Spooky?

2011-09-22T21:55:00.000+02:00

Speaking of spooky - here's one I took in my daughter's room when I was just looking for a reason to expose the last frame of a roll of Tri-X.

Entrance

2011-09-19T21:37:00.001+02:00

A spooky corner here in Hamburg. This photo was taken in January.

Window

2011-09-17T10:00:00.000+02:00

Cough, did I already mention that film cameras are so cheap these days that it's kind of hard not to buy them? Here's another case - a nice Nikon 35Ti I got for a few bucks.

Red chair

2011-09-10T17:29:00.000+02:00

Shot in close proximity to one I uploaded recently. You'll figure it out.

Red

2011-09-08T22:11:00.002+02:00

Another highway picture, this time from the Netherlands.

Chewing gum

2011-09-05T21:58:00.000+02:00

So don't do that!

Window

2011-09-04T14:18:00.000+02:00

I seem to have a penchant for flowers and plants lately.

Autoroute

2011-08-30T09:35:00.001+02:00

A public toilet next to a highway in France. Almost a work of art...

Sahnetorte

2011-08-29T22:09:00.000+02:00

As far as I know there's no proper English translation for the word in today's headline, so it's probably something typical German. I rarely eat that stuff, but there are those days when I feel the urge to have one.

Thunderstorm

2011-08-27T11:53:00.000+02:00

I rarely look at the weather forecast, so when I drove home on my bike I got soaking wet - probably serves me right. The only good thing is that I took this photo before the whole mess started.

Bathtub

2011-08-26T09:26:00.000+02:00

This is an interior that was made without flash. I like how the early morning sun renders the picture.

Gas station

2011-08-23T10:25:00.000+02:00

Another vacation picture.

Ave Maria

2011-08-21T08:26:00.001+02:00

The first photo from Belgium in this blog.

Door

2011-08-19T10:35:00.000+02:00

Taken not far away from the previous one, but not on the same day.

Flower

2011-08-18T12:09:00.001+02:00

It somehow looked lonely behind bars.

Rug

2011-08-17T13:33:00.000+02:00

Same place and time as the last one.

Child safety seat

2011-08-15T14:28:00.000+02:00

It's time to continue with interiors...

One way

2011-08-14T14:15:00.000+02:00

One of the first photos taken back in Hamburg after the vacation.

A few stickers

2011-08-13T11:36:00.000+02:00

By chance, I saw this one on Flickr and was reminded that I took a similar photo about a year later. And even with the same type of camera.

Fern

2011-08-07T15:18:00.001+02:00

Another self portrait, if you look closely.

Merci

2011-08-04T18:22:00.003+02:00

In France, I finally had the chance to see some nice cemeteries again.

Diesel

2011-08-01T16:53:00.000+02:00

In spite of the last picture, I'll continue with some vacation shots.

In a nutshell

2011-07-30T21:11:00.001+02:00

Here's a summary and probably all you need to know about this year's vacation. I still might post some other photos from there in the next days, though.

Coq gaulois

2011-07-29T11:02:00.000+02:00

This is to give you a hint where I spent the last three weeks.

Barbapapa

2011-07-28T02:25:00.000+02:00

Looks like we haven't had a dog for quite some time.

Strange fruit

2011-07-27T02:07:00.000+02:00

Organic food, by the way. And the photo was taken only a few meters away from where the film was eventually developed.

(You noticed the song title, didn't you?)

Smiley

2011-07-06T23:02:00.000+02:00

"Oh no! Not another new camera!" Yeah, you're probably right. But it was the kind of offer you can't refuse - an Olympus OM-2n for about the same price I paid for the Holga. What would you have done?

Anyway, this is the last photo before the summer break. In case you'll get bored in the meantime, you might want to check out which of my pictures other people find "interesting" according to Flickr.

Angel

2011-07-04T20:22:00.000+02:00

My father-in-law was so nice to give me an old Rolleicord Va which he stopped using a long time ago, and so we have another new camera in this blog. It's a bit hard to get used to, but I think I'll eventually be able to cope with it.

For this particular picture, the square format wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I think it works anyway.

Legs

2011-07-02T17:06:00.000+02:00

Another one from last week.

Wandse

2011-07-01T12:54:00.001+02:00

That's the name of a little river that runs through Hamburg. This is how it looked from a bridge last week when the mixture of reflections and shadows caught my eye.

Colors courtesy of Porta 160VC.

Armchair

2011-06-28T15:30:00.000+02:00

The "poetic" continuation of the interior series - again without flash.

Window

2011-06-27T13:48:00.001+02:00

Seen here in Hamburg two weeks ago.

Straw

2011-06-25T23:37:00.000+02:00

Farming geometry in Duisburg, near the Rhine.

Basement

2011-06-24T23:06:00.001+02:00

This is where my bicycle is spending most of the nights.

Taken with the XA and without flash and thus a little bit blurry.

Wall

2011-06-22T22:35:00.001+02:00

In case you haven't noticed yet, this new interior series depends a lot on the usage of a flash. That's something I never did for more than 15 years (I actually despised it in a way), but for this kind of work it is not only a technical convenience, I also think it provides a certain character I'd like to have in these images.

So I bought an old SF 20 via eBay which I'm happily using now.

(You could of course use a tripod instead, but that would take away some of the spontaneity.)

Roof

2011-06-20T14:26:00.000+02:00

Picking up some common themes like birds and looking up.

Bed

2011-06-18T15:53:00.002+02:00

I've recently begun to publish a selection of my photos (including some not shown here, by the way) on Flickr. To my surprise, this one turned out to be one of the most popular so far.

Manhattan Bridge

2011-06-17T10:42:00.000+02:00

Let's loosen up the sequence of color photos with an image from last year. See also here.

Red

2011-06-16T11:25:00.002+02:00

Interior number four. From last weekend.

Stepladder

2011-06-15T12:44:00.002+02:00

This one is from 2009 already, but it somehow fits with what I'm currently shooting.

A car, somewhere

2011-06-14T09:22:00.001+02:00

It is probably fair to say that this is a shot about nothing.

The flag

2011-06-13T20:57:00.000+02:00

I've had the XA in my jacket pocket pretty much every day in the last weeks and this is one of the most recent results.

Coming home

2011-06-11T00:27:00.000+02:00

My head is empty - no idea what to write about this one.

Bathrobe

2011-06-10T14:21:00.002+02:00

Let's continue with the interiors.

Watchtower

2011-06-09T08:46:00.000+02:00

Not as old as the one from yesterday.

Grocery

2011-06-08T12:55:00.000+02:00

An old one.

Interior

2011-06-07T23:33:00.001+02:00

I'm currently having fun with interiors. In fact, I already showed one last month.

Helicopter...

2011-06-06T01:52:00.001+02:00

...over Berlin.

Flowers

2011-06-02T23:04:00.000+02:00

Near the St Pauli football stadium about two weeks ago.

Plate

2011-05-31T14:46:00.000+02:00

Filled with things you probably shouldn't eat right now. Slide film again.

McD

2011-05-20T23:34:00.000+02:00

While we're talking about things I did for the first time, this one's from the first ever slide film I exposed "in earnest" - a roll of Ektachrome 100VS. So, I'm obviously a) still experimenting and b) still playing with color. And, yeah, let's just forget what I wrote here...

Forest

2011-05-15T22:14:00.002+02:00

More trees, although it doesn't look like a jungle this time. Taken at the A7.

Bag

2011-05-13T23:12:00.000+02:00

No comment.

Projections

2011-05-10T23:48:00.000+02:00

Another view out of a train window. What I like here is how the cabin's interior is "projected" onto the lake.

Escalator up

2011-05-08T01:05:00.000+02:00

I seem to have a tendency to repeat titles lately.

The second umbrella

2011-05-06T13:51:00.003+02:00

We had the first one almost exactly a year ago. What I totally missed is that the picture from Wednesday was the 300th posting in this blog already. Please imagine you heard some kind of fanfare two days ago.

And this one is the third (gasp!) color picture in a row - something almost unthinkable a few weeks ago. Plus, it's a first in two different ways, but I won't bother you with technical stuff today.

Sailing boats

2011-05-04T12:40:00.001+02:00

More color. And like yesterday's picture, this is actually old stuff. What makes it "new" is the post-processing treatment I applied after ignoring these photos for quite some time.

Do not enter, again

2011-05-03T23:47:00.000+02:00

I had a photo with the same title here more than a year ago and coincidentally it was also taken in Boston - even on the same day.

Yep, the first color picture in 2011. I had to work a bit on this one until it looked the way I wanted it to look and surprisingly that made me fancy color again. Don't be surprised if you see more of this soon. You already noticed that I'm currently in an experimental phase, didn't you?

Diptych

2011-05-02T22:41:00.000+02:00

My first ever diptych. And in case you were wondering: none of this was arranged or posed in any way.

Shot, by the way, neither with the new Holga nor with one of the Leicas. And the film wasn't Tri-X either...

Through

2011-04-30T23:36:00.001+02:00

I think it might be a distant relative of this one.

Tracks

2011-04-24T14:21:00.000+02:00

Another one showing the Elbe. From the second roll with the Holga, taken on Good Friday.

Square bike

2011-04-19T21:01:00.001+02:00

So, yeah, I bought a new camera. I spent a whopping 17 Euros for a brand-new Holga. (Actually, I essentially got it for free, but that's another story.)

I somehow had the feeling that I needed something new to "revitalize" my photography and there certainly is a lot that's new (for me) about this camera - for example it's the first time I ever shot square pictures and it's the first time I ever had to deal with medium format film. And that doesn't even take into account all the quirks the Holga is famous for.

What bothers me a little bit is that analog "toy" cameras are kind of a fad in these digital days. I'd rather use something that's totally uncool. (But as a consolation to myself I note that even luminaries like Sylvia Plachy or Michael Ackerman use Holgas every now and then, so it's obviously possible to just use them as tools instead of making a fashion statement.)

Anyway, filling the first roll felt "liberating" in a certain way because almost everything was different from shooting with one of the Leicas. I certainly won't use the Holga as my only camera in the future, but you will likely see more square photos in the next weeks.

Oh, and some things rarely change: The film was Tri-X as almost always.

Merry-go-round

2011-04-10T16:17:00.002+02:00

This is more about what I wanted to see than what I actually photographed, so some post-processing was needed.

The hole

2011-04-09T22:23:00.000+02:00

By now, you can probably guess where this is.

Another tree

2011-04-07T00:34:00.001+02:00

More than ten years go, I was presented with a Lomo LC-A. I think it was a joke at that time and I ran maybe one or two films through the camera and then put it away.

Last month, though, I pulled it out of the drawer for a change. Here's how it rendered a tree near our house.

Bus

2011-04-06T11:18:00.000+02:00

And while we're talking about buses, here's one taken from a bus window in Brooklyn last year.

Harbor

2011-04-03T00:20:00.002+02:00

A part of Hamburg's harbor as seen through the window of a bus on a foggy morning a few days ago.

Unrelated to this picture, I'd like to recommend two small photo books that I recently bought: One is Tangente by Laurent Chardon and the other one is Elsewhere by Øyvind Hjelmen. Both show only photos in square format which is something I didn't like very much for years. But it seems I changed my mind recently.

Tokyo

2011-03-30T11:12:00.002+02:00

Taken through a hotel window early in the morning on a dusky November day. The light (on which I admit I had to work a bit) gives the picture a somewhat forbidding atmosphere and at the same time makes the houses look like toys.

Given the recent events, this old photo seemed fitting. And it's from the Ricoh series.

Acela

2011-03-28T00:28:00.002+02:00

In an effort to get rid of some of my cameras (not that I have that many, mind you), I sold the Ricoh some days ago. And in a subsequent bout of nostalgia I went through the photos I took with this camera to see if there had been some I didn't do justice to. Here's one I found and I'll probably add a few more in the next weeks.

This one was taken looking out of the window of the Acela somewhere between Boston and New York in 2009.

Working the situation some more

2011-03-26T02:04:00.003+01:00

As promised. A few days later, but still the same building. Now with more birds, though, and without a street lamp.

And this was the first time ever I've used Rollei RPX 400. I'm not sure yet if I like it or not. (As far as I understand, someone bought the rights to use the name. The film is not manufactured by the famous German camera maker.)

The photo was slightly cropped and I worked quite a bit on the tonal values of the sky.

Working the situation

2011-03-20T21:15:00.002+01:00

I have an ongoing debate with Olaf about working the situation during which I quite vigorously took up a position against chimping and argued that you can't take the same photo twice anyway.

Of course, I went over the top a bit for the sake of "philosophical clarity." While I generally like Eggleston's attitude of shooting each subject only once, I certainly sometimes try different viewpoints, angles, f-stops, or distances. And there are even cases where I return to the scene of the crime later and pick up where I left.

This is one such example that I already worked on about three weeks ago. It's the same building and I used the same camera, the same lens, and the same film to take a photo from almost the same place. But enough things have changed (including the house itself) to definitely make this a very different picture. Whether that makes it a new one or only a variation of the old one, I'll let you decide.

I'll likely work this "situation" even more...

Tree

2011-03-16T21:47:00.002+01:00

A very simple picture that I took more than two years ago and almost forgot. It recently began to grow on me, though, if you allow the pun.

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA.

Fake bird

2011-03-10T14:47:00.000+01:00

It's time for a window view again.

Behind bars

2011-03-09T11:40:00.000+01:00

From the same day as the other one. And probably not the last one from that day I'm going to show. My experience is that on some days you have several keepers while on others you can fill rolls and rolls of film without one good shot. I guess I'm not alone...

Ballet

2011-03-06T22:27:00.011+01:00

Alexey Brodovitch's Ballet is a wonderful book. But it's also one of the rarest and most sought-after photo books in the world. So far, I only knew those parts of this seminal work that were reproduced in Jane Livingston's The New York School. However, the very commendable Books on Books series recently released a "study" of Ballet which I immediately ordered.

The funny coincidence now is that the book arrived about a week ago and two days later I had to bring my daughter to her ballet lessons and (what I usually don't have to) pick her up again an hour later. Inspired by Brodovitch's book, I decided to take my Leica with me and stay there in order to take some shots. Here's the one I like best. And, yes, these are my daughter's feet.

Election Eve

2011-03-05T15:53:00.001+01:00

We had a state election here two weeks ago and due to a couple of new rules a lot of people thought that it was a lot more complicated than usual. This picture somehow seems to confirm that.

Incidentally, today's title is also the name of a book by William Eggleston...

Frame

2011-03-04T08:26:00.002+01:00

Taken only a few meters away from the previous one. It's probably not readily apparent on screen, but due to limited depth of field and the slight mist the print renders the inner square as if it were a drawing or a painting.

See also here.

Frappant revisited

2011-03-03T23:23:00.003+01:00

The Frappant building again, about a year later. This is also from the first roll of film I shot with my new (used) M6 TTL which I mainly bought for its 0.58 viewfinder. The M7 will have to go eventually...

And, yes, in case you've been following this blog you will have noticed that I've switched back to the old format only a few weeks after I made the big change. Turns out several people convinced me that they liked it better this way, so there you have it again, with only very minor changes.

Pole

2011-02-14T22:57:00.002+01:00

Same place, same day.

Traces

2011-02-09T11:02:00.007+01:00

Near the Baltic Sea in Northern Germany.

Horse

2011-02-04T15:28:00.002+01:00

I sidled through the barns while outside my daughter was having fun riding a pony. And I had fun, too. One of my favorite photos of the last months.

Window

2011-01-20T16:58:00.000+01:00

Worker symbol

2011-01-12T16:05:00.001+01:00

Symbols of the world, unite?

Frozen

2011-01-08T22:23:00.001+01:00

The Elbe again, about a week ago when it was still mostly frozen.

This is the second photo in this blog that has different curves applied to different parts of the image.

Street level

2011-01-03T23:15:00.000+01:00

Olaf tells me this blog is too heavily leaned towards the technical side and I generally agree with him. Nevertheless, this one's from the first roll of film I ever tried stand development with and so I thought I should at least mention that. I was quite pleased with the results and will very likely try this again.

Also the first blog entry as well as the first photo of 2011...

Park

2010-12-30T01:28:00.001+01:00

One of the pictures that are more about what you can't see than what's on the photo.

Night

2010-12-25T21:37:00.001+01:00

From the hotel window series. Maybe you'll recognize the curtain.

Saxes

2010-12-22T13:48:00.000+01:00

A concert of The Screenclub at the Stellwerk in Harburg in October.

Staircase

2010-12-21T22:08:00.001+01:00

A bit more than two weeks ago I was in Cambridge again. Probably for the last time, but who knows...

Suit

2010-12-19T20:38:00.000+01:00

Another one from the tailor's studio.

Yogurt

2010-12-18T22:51:00.000+01:00

I'm unearthing a couple of older color photos quite some time after I stopped taking them. Maybe I'll try again one day.

White line, too

2010-12-14T07:49:00.000+01:00

A variant of this one, twelve years later. Did I make any progress since?

2 liter bottles

2010-12-13T02:03:00.001+01:00

One more from October.

Hidden

2010-11-25T08:39:00.000+01:00

A poster in Hamburg a few weeks ago.

Blotch

2010-11-24T07:46:00.000+01:00

This was almost ten months ago.