The second umbrella

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

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

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

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

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

Tracks

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

Square bike

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

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

The hole

By now, you can probably guess where this is.

Another tree

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

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

Harbor

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's time for a window view again.

Behind bars

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

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

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

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

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

Same place, same day.

Traces

Near the Baltic Sea in Northern Germany.

Horse

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

More from Wetzlar.

Worker symbol

Symbols of the world, unite?

Frozen

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

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...