What's (in) the Picture?

Chris Breebaart Photography – finding stories

Chris Breebaart

Hello there! I am Chris Breebaart, 65 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 cameras from my sister. These included an Agfa and an East German Praktika that weighed a ton but had a Zeiss Lens. Later, I bought my first camera, a Pentax K1000. I remained faithful to Pentax until my ME-II Super shutter broke down. I experienced the hassle of repairing it many 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. Ad since 2016 I used the Nikon D500 as well. In 2025 I gave up my DSLR’s for a Nikon Zf. It brings back the fun of an old mechanic camera with dials, in combination with electronic state of the art. And the idea that it weighs less is an urban legend.

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 is gone with digital. Even better was developing prints myself. 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 keep 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. Sometimes it is endearing to read what a photo can do to a visitor.

That theme matches the topic of my photo blog: What’s (in) the picture? Finding stories. Photo’s tell stories. My story (what made me click my shutter), and the story of the spectator.

At the start of my photo path I used to get comments ‘why do you shoot that? That is not a nice photo!’. In a time of film it was impossible to show a result quickly to make my idea visible. Wait, be patient, wait for the print! I printed my own monochrome photos in my darkroom. But sometimes I was not able to create the envisioned result. I had the passion, but lacked the skills and patience to achieve that. Nowadays you just look at the back of your camera and share that with the critic. And sometimes even that does not make sense, but it shows a picture. Developing with software today is easier that in the darkroom. The scanned negatives that were too difficult to print in the darkroom can be shared now.

Photography is about seeing, observing the world. And be ready for the decisive moment as Henri Cartier-Bresson said. My photos tell my story of the world. They are my way of giving ‘voice’ to something that made me press the shutter. It is something that reflects inside me. That is extremely subjective. Showing my photos to the world taught me that my story is uniquely mine. It can differ from the story of my distinguished visitors. My story is not their story. So, what’s behind a photo?

 

284 Responses to “Chris Breebaart”

  4. Carolina Russo's avatar
    YesterdayAfter

    Beautiful photo of my native country Italy I was born in Naples and moved to US in 2002. Love to see this photo of beautiful Spanish Steps here, and when you took it in 1993 I was still in Italy!

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

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