In the blink of an eye

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Veronica is cleaning the ship's hold with a powerful water hose. I thought this could potentially provide some good photo options. Water, light, a lot of dark areas and some real life action, what more can you want. Measuring the light was a challenge.  If you expose for the overall scene the way your light meter will suggest,  where the meter wants to create detail in the shadow areas,  you end up with blown unrecoverable highlights. The contrast is just too big. In other words, automatic exposure is out of the question. As you might know I use a Leica M10, which uses a center-weighted light meter. That helps a bit in these circumstances because it will allow me to select my metered subject as opposed to multi-field exposure systems where the camera's electronics decide on what to meter and how to expose.  A spot meter would be the technically preferred option, because with that I could meter the exact dynamic r...

At Terneuzen, strolling along the Westerschelde.  While sitting on a breaker and enjoying the sun I decided to create a photograph where I would f orce the attention on one single pane in the picture,  using the depth of field, or better the lack of depth-of-field. The two people on the beach would be the main focus point. To achieve this I tried to have the first pane, the foreground, sufficiently close to the camera to be blurred and I could only hope that the subjects in the third pane, the ships, would be enough out of focus as well. I use a rangefinder camera, so I could only check if my attempt worked out after the picture was taken. This was a '50mm day', meaning I went out with my 50 mm Summicron attached to the camera and nothing else. Selecting only one lens can be very liberating and forces you to focus on a pictures content and not on what lens to select for your next photograph. You have no choice, which is a good thing, you can concentrate ...

Our son is moving to another house and we had some stuff stored at his old place, a good opportunity to assist him a bit in getting things organised. As you can see, he appreciated us being there. I have been making photographs of my life and everyone and everything associated with it for as long as I have a camera. I photograph everything that I am remotely passionate about so photographing life is unavoidable for me. That means that my relatives are very much used to being photographed by me and will not act unnatural when confronted with a camera. When I am there so is the camera, it's as simple as that. The photograph above is the last one of the series of pictures below.  Mother and sun were removing a desk.  The window on the left provided a good primary light source with the walls reflecting enough light to fill the shadows.  The photographs I made were ok, but a real good one was no...

Now this is our actual daily life. Passing through Paris on the Seine. Not every day, but it is something we do on a regular basis. We travel Europe and that includes Paris, from time to time. Not that special, if you live in Paris you do it all day, but never the less. I knew we where going through the central city at an hour that might be very opportune for some nice photographs, so I prepared the camera on forehand, knowing I would not be able to set much once we would be at the actual site due to the heavy Seine barge traffic and the narrow bridges that would require my full attention. I selected the 35mm and set the ISO to 3200, shutter speed to 1/60s, aperture f4. This would allow for handheld picture taking and seemed to me the best compromise. I test fired some shots once we got going, reviewed them in-camera and adjusted my exposure a little to 1/45s of a second. Once at the Bras de la Monnaie near the Notre Dame I was all set for a nice one.

Black and White on a digital camera designed for color. Not easy. Very easy. Depends on your wishes. I adore the quality of my Black and White scans from real film. See some previous posts. And that quality is impossible to reproduce using a digital camera and a software based 'developer'. No matter what film simulation add-on you use, no matter what Lightroom and Photoshop or Capture One settings one figures out, it is not the same.  Not surprising as they are two completely different beasts. Even the results I see from Leica Monochrome camera's do not look like 'film' to me. Very beautiful digital images, but not film. But can we get close? In Black and White film, the dark parts of a film image tend to loose detail. The light parts on the other hand maintain an unbelievable amount of detail when scanned and processed right. This can be influenced a little by the exposure and development of the original film negative, but the general characteristics...

A very special day at the Oosterschelde. Hardly any wind, the horizon seemed to disappear completely. If it would not be for the sand-bank you could not see where the water stops and the sky begins. These photographs are only possible when you are at the right place at the right time and that's not that easily to obtain on open water, but we are very fortunate to have work that enables these opportunities 'just like that', they just happen.

We where on the Rhein at Oestrich, going to Worms, together with the ship in the picture. We always start early so we caught a nice Sunrise and I saw this picture starting to come together. I switched to my Elmarit 2.8/135mm and attached the Visoflex EVF.  For those outside the Leica World, the Visoflex is an Electronic View Finder (EVF) for the Leica M camera. An M has a very basic viewfinder (although technically very complicated) and this viewfinder is not very suitable for any optics longer than ca 90mm. The Elmarit I have is even equipped with a special optical device that will enhance the regular viewfinder, but even then it is far from ideal.  With the EVF we suddenly have a mirrorless camera that enables you to view the image directly from the camera sensor, allowing you to look through your lens. Ideal for longer lenses such as this one. This picture was taken with a Novoflex 5.6/400mm lens, impossible on a r...

No posts in a long time. A lot has happened in our personal life, no time for the internet  and no time to develop and scan my films. I tried almost all commercial labs, but am very unhappy with their scans, they can not mach what I do on my little Epson . So film was becoming a bit of a dead end.  Fast forward to the beginning of this year. Leica announced the M10 and for the first time I had the feeling this was indeed a digital Leica I would like to own. Yeah, who would not. Unavailable and very very expensive. Then I happened to be in Amsterdam, and behold, Nivo-Schweizer had a black M10 on display, one of the first. I looked at my wife, "If we go in we know we will buy this, are we going to do that"? Ofcourse we did. We went in, they even had a boxed one in the back so we bought it and unpacked the thing right there, let them throw away the boxes, inserted an SD card and walked out to take some pictures. This will probably never happen again, we cannot r...

I love Ports. There is usually  a lot to see when Land meets Water. The horizon is a little off, but does it really matter?  The picture has a lot to tell. Like I said before, I think a good picture should trigger your mind, make you think. 

Remember I has some issues with the Carl Zeiss Biogon 2.0/35mm? I recently found a beautiful Summicron 35mm, the pre-ASP version. Yes, that one. So, if you get a new lens, you want to try it out, so I did. Nice backlight, Sun right ahead, see what happens. I am not going to discuss what you can see for yourself, I like it a lot, very different from the Biogon, Zeiss versus Leica indeed.

I love a good Fair, always a lot of opportunities for a good picture. The one at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France is particularly good. I walked around, camera in my hand with the strap rapped around my arm, camera slightly behind my back. For me this works good, the camera is ready to be used, but nobody will notice you as a photographer, you can be very discreet. The camera is all set, ISO is a given with film, I set the aperture and shutter speed before I start. I also set the distance to something like 2 meters, which is usually more-or-less right for the type of picture I expect to be making here. This works superb on a Leica, it is actually the main reason I use it. When I saw this girl I raised the camera to my eye, re-adjusted the distance using the range-finder (having set the distance beforehand required only a very minor turn) and click, there she was. This is another one at the same Fair. Who says you can not get in-focus shots from a moving subject ...

I am more and more looking for surreal pictures, let you guess as much as possible. I was in Antwerp last week, and the light was great, so I visited the stairs at the MAS there. Always good for few shots. I worked on some shots featuring people in front of the transparent walls, but I got only more-or-less ordinary shots, nothing that really popped-out. And then I saw these two. The story is all yours :-)

I have this slumbering project on beach resorts, I guess this one will be part of that. Again, I am not sure I want to discuss what we are looking at. Let's just say I took a few pictures of this. Quiet surreal. Technically not much to add, I exposed for the shadows, and maybe even a little too much, the grain is a little excessive for this film + developer combination.

I think a photograph should tell a story, should be more then just pleasing to the eye. Even better, for me the story is much more important. I am done with simple pleasing pictures, like Blue 'n White and some other previous posts. I want to challenge my viewers to invent their own story, get the imagination to work. This is a nice example. I won't even start to explain to you what I see here, you can make that up for yourself. I also believe in adding layers to a picture, having things happening at several places. Not easy, but very rewarding when you get it right. That means that you can look several times at a photograph and discover something extra from time to time. That also worked for me, here. Also, I don't think anyone with a bit of artistic ambition is ever 100% satisfied. That would kill the process. We never create the work that does it all, has it all. For me, there are some flaws here too, something to impro...

I don't think I am going to tell you what you are looking at. The what was there, but the how , not that simple. There was not much light, and I needed some depth of field to make both foreground and background recognisable, meaning a relative long exposure, even at ISO 400. Not sure what the actual combination was, I think f8 at 1/2 second or something like that. I used my monopod to handle the long exposure, giving me enough support to prevent the camera from shaking. A real life-saver sometimes, a nice lightweight although unstable platform. Unstable as in riding a motorcycle, part of the experience, just something to get used to. Obviously the image at the bottom, the crossing and the light on top had to be in the picture, but should not be blocked by the window, and with a Leica, that's not so easily achieved because of the so called lens parallax, in short the fact that you are not looking through the lens that will make the picture. In this case th...

The light was magnificent, low evening sun, full of promise. I knew there where great pictures in the air, I only had to grab them. Only. In conditions like that I become very focussed, single minded and unsocial. There are pictures to be found, never mind the rest. While climbing the escalator, I saw these women coming down, I had no time to set anything, I just raised the camera and clicked. Mind you, this is an M6, no Auto-anything as we know it today (but a lot of automation in it's days LOL). I always pre-set my exposure to a setting that more-or-less suits the environment I am in, and sometimes a zone-focussing distance, but not this time. You can see that the girl in the center is out of focus, the focus seems to be set to a greater distance, look at the person in the back. Probably ∞ . But all that technical bla is completely irrelevant here. See & Shoot, think later. I love this picture, it is a direction of style I would like to go to. For me, ...

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide when to click. The picture itself is there in your mind. You know the 'what', the sentiment you want to capture. But when.. The lines, the people, the technical stuff on the ceiling, not difficult to see. But there would be a lot of people in the frame, and they should be, but which one to choose as main actor, what expression or movement or silhouette to wait for? In the end, I took a few different frames, concentrating on the woman a little to the right of the centre, sitting next to the window. Exposure was a little tricky, I wanted to show the world outside the window, silhouette the people, but at the same time I wanted to keep as much of the inside of the room visible. I measured for the foreground, the table and the floor, reasoning that the film would be able to capture the lighter parts. This might not work so well with digital, but film has an astonishing ability to capture the lighter parts. The o...

I don't fancy a description to accompany a picture, this is not journalism. I prefer to let the viewer work it out. But in this case the why does have an added value. This is at the Making of Harry Potter Studio Tour, near London, just before entering the actual studio. Enough said. Technically, another challenge, I had to react super quickly, he just popped in view, looking like he did, so I just snapped. Hence the tilted frame etc. Never mind, content always wins over technique in my view.

When taking pictures during a day, either working on a story or just visiting an unknown place, I have a tendency to take less and less pictures. Creating photographs takes a lot of energy, but so does moving through an unknown place, or city, or environment, interacting with your surroundings, getting fed in time, moving from one location to another, you get the idea. In other words, I get tired. Very tired, and often much too tired to continue taking meaningful pictures. I just can't be bothered anymore. Not a big deal when I take pictures for my own fun, but it becomes a problem when I have to deliver something at the end. I will force myself to keep working, but only to find out that the quality is not really there anymore. I am just too tired. The above picture was taken with the beautiful Leica Elmarit 2.8/135mm. Not too bad a picture, not all that special either. And the only picture I took with that lens during the entire day. I carried over 700 gr. of lens...