What's (in) the Picture?

Chris Breebaart

Hello there! I am Chris Breebaart, 61 years of age, living in The Netherlands. One of my hobbies is taking pictures. I started as a little kid and kept going! On this blog I publish pictures; some are from the archive, some are recent.

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic. From there I borrowed camera’s from my sister (an Agfa, an East German Praktika that weighed a ton – but with a Zeiss Lens – ) before I bought my first camera, a Pentax K1000. I remained faithful to Pentax until my ME-II Super shutter broke down. Having had the hassle of repairing it lots of times I decided to turn to Nikon, and I stayed there since. My first Nikon was a F301, then a F90 (occasionally still in use).  In 2004 I took the step to digital with a Nikon D70. In 2012 I switched to the Nikon D7000. and since 2016 I am using the Nikon D500 as well.

Being one of a generation that grew up with monochrome, I love shooting black and white. Most of my archive is build on that. I love the Kodak TriX, a great film. My love for monochrome was kept alive using various iPhones more and more as a source for photography. Having a phone always with me, I use it a lot for snapshots.  My favourite app was Hueless.  It reminded me of the ‘old’ days when I started to learn to work with monochrome film. The app had built in filters and allowed me to focus and measure light flexible. The big difference compared to film is I now can see the results immediately. Unfortunately Hueless has not been adapted to IOS 11, yet. I do hope it will be available again, to use on my iPhone.

The thrill of seeing a developed film from the lab or – even better – developing prints myself, is gone with digital. It was always a surprise to see what came out, and how it came out. And back in those days photography was expensive. Film, chemicals, tools, enlarger, clocks, a dark room, paper etc cost money. But what did not change over the years was my way of working: most of what I do is intuitive.

My iPhone and iPad are also my ‘darkroom’. I edit photos for this blog using Snapseed and Marksta. My DSLR photos are downloaded to my iPad from my network storage. The result is good enough for this blog. Printing on paper is something different. I use Lightroom to maintain my archive.

I hope you do enjoy visiting this blog, and I do hope that you will come back regularly. Enjoy your stay. If you feel like it leave me some comments and feedback! It is nice to see comments and sometimes it is endearing to read what a photo can do to a visitor.