Summer

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

Wandse

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.

Through

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

Acela

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.

Textures

I forgot what I thought when I took this picture, but now I think it's about textures. I generally don't make conscious decisions when I'm pressing the shutter. In fact, I try to avoid thinking too hard and too long about a picture while I'm shooting. I prefer to be surprised by what I "saw" when I later see the contact sheet.

Shadow

It's some time ago since I posted the last self portrait and I'm not doing many of them anyway. But this one I really like. And please note that the light was exactly like this on that day - no dodging and burning or anything like that.

Presence

Talking about the presence of the photographer in the photo, here's one where not only the subject felt it but where it's clearly imprinted into the picture as well.

Lisbon, 1999, M4-P, Tri-X.

The Birds

The shadows look slightly threatening, don't they? This was taken in Hell's Kitchen on March 16. I think I'm going to start another mini series - this time about pictures I took in New York last month.

The M7 with the 35mm Summicron, Tri-X in Rodinal.

A gap

I couldn't resist to post yet another one from Coney Island. I liked the light on that day.

Shadows and light

Is this one too abstract? I don't think so. But I know that it came out pretty much the way I expected. It's the wall of the train station below Oslo's airport seen through a glass pane and I wanted to achieve exactly this "painterly" look.

The photo was taken a few minutes before I took this one with the same camera and film.

Also note that there's a nice Joni Mitchell album with the same title.

Sea wall

A boy walking on one of the sea walls of Akko on August 17, 1995. I like the geometrical clarity of this picture with its pronounced highlights and shadows - something that's clearly easier to achieve in the South.

Taken with the Nikon and Tri-X developed in Rodinal. This photo was scanned with a scanner that can't reach as far as the negative's border, so what you're seeing here is a border which was added digitally. The photo wasn't cropped, though.

Paint, light, shadows, chair legs

The floor of my wife's studio in the winterly morning sun of this year's January 30.

I recently received a bunch of "expired" rolls of film almost for free and amongst them was some Neopan 1600, so that was what I was using here, developed in HC-110. M7, 35mm Summicron.

On the run

It's the third time already that I'm mentioning Garry Winogrand in this blog. The funny thing is that I don't even like his photos that much. I do think, though, that some of his one-liners about photography are very deep. "I photograph because I want to see what the world looks like photographed," is one of my favorites. It sounds banal first, but in my opinion it isn't, and for me it also explains a lot about why I take photos.

I was reminded of the quote when I looked at this photo again more than half a year after I took it.  It's one of those shots where at least consciously I wasn't aware of what exactly I was photographing when I pressed the shutter.

Taken with the M8.2 and the 50mm Summicron at ISO 160 in Genoa on July 5, 2009.

Shoes

One way to clean your shoes...

Shot with the Nikon on Tri-X in Ollioules on July 13, 1995.

Coney Island

A snapshot of two unknown children almost looking like one. A skewed horizon. Lots of parallel lines. Articulated shadows. The reflection of a beam of sunlight. Season to taste. That was the recipe for this picture.

M4-P on Tri-X in 1998.

Only

A very nice and sunny morning in Cambridge, MA, albeit very cold. In fact, it was so cold that I was happy to have my trusty M4-P with me. I doubt that the batteries of a digital camera would have lasted very long.

Taken on January 31, 2009 with Kodak BW400CN. And in case you think that I'm kind of "promiscuous" with films - I'm not. Except for my very first year of photography (and a few indoor shootings where I used Neopan 1600) I've always used Tri-X until my preferred lab stopped developing films in 2008. Only then did I start trying out various C41 black-and-white films as replacement candidates. I'm not even sure if I will stay with one of them. Maybe I'll eventually start doing my own development again and then I'll of course return to Tri-X. So, stay tuned...

Fake shadows

This one's from 1996, taken in Whitechapel in London. I like the shadows in this picture, the one of the mother, the one of the traffic light that we don't see, and the fake ones of the birds on the billboard. And also how the hairdo of the little girl echoes the movement, both its own and that of the ducks.

I took six photos at the same place in a few minutes, but this is the one I like most.

Again, this is the M4-P with the 35mm Summicron on Tri-X, developed by myself. I took notes at that time, so I know it was March 27, and the shot was taken with f/16 at 1/250.

Two dogs

This is not the first photo I ever took, but I think it's the first one I really liked and I still like it. Why, I can't really say, it's probably because of the interplay of lines and shadows and the perspective and the movement of the dog on the right.

Obviously, this wasn't a planned photo. If I remember correctly I was there (the photo was taken at the Maschsee in Hanover) with my girlfriend, probably sitting on a park bench, saw the dogs and took this snapshot. It was the only photo I took of this scene.

That was in February 1995 and the camera was a Nikon FM2 - my first camera and the only one I had at that time. The only lens I had (and thus the one I used) was a 50/1.8 Nikkor. Film was Ilford Delta 400 which I developed myself in ID-11. This was the 20th roll of film I had done since I started with photography about a year earlier.