England, Stowmarket – Little Stonham – December 2024
Ending the year in the UK, a roadside view from the car over a foggy Suffolk countryside. Hence the sharpness is not optimal. This is another one I used GrainLab to put in an analogue grain feeling. It softened the darks and gave the photo a more balanced view in the highlights. Snapseed tends to distort big surfaces in the sky, and this is a nice retouch effect to repair that.
England, Stowmarket – Little Stonham – December 2024
Ending the year in the UK, a roadside view from the car over a foggy Suffolk countryside. Hence the sharpness is not optimal. This is the first time I used GrainLab to put in an analogue grain feeling. It softened the darks and gave the photo a more balanced view in the highlights. Snapseed tends to distort big surfaces in the sky, and this is a nice retouch effect to repair that.
The last in a series of seven photos, taken on a foggy morning from the J.H. Oortbrug in Oegstgeest. The photos can be found in the archive Oegstgeester Kanaal, link down here.
Crossed to a new year, 2025 is just started. I wish everyone a wonderful 2025 in good health, with loads of love and moments in which wishes become reality. Where we can talk and bridge judgments.
The first photos of my new camera, the Nikon Zf. A retro FM2 on the outside but on the inside full of brilliant Nikon Z technology. Its a real hands on camera, with manual settings. I’m learning to use it. One of the reasons to buy it was the availability of three monochrome presets.
This week’s Lens Artitsts Photo Challenge (#321) is Intentional Camera Movement (ICM). These photos are from a workshop in 1997 in France, where we had to create movement with a low shutter speed while following the subject. Basically a fun excercise but done on film. So the result literally came to light after developing the film. The excitement and anxiety about the possible results were out of scale! Patience.
These film archives are the source of my B4 retouch series.
About the B4 retouch series: I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. Some of them are partly retouched but most do have scratches, dust and stains.
Shot with Nikon F90 on Kodak TriX, scanned from film and edited using Snapseed andMarksta. Click the picture for a bigger version
LAPC #316 is ‘Finding beauty in unexpected places’. One of the objects for photographs is the canal that runs through my village. It is quite ordinary, there is a vast amount of small and little canals to dispose of water in The Netherlands. To manage water in a country that is partly under sea level, one has to build infrastructure to keep dry feet. Two pictures taken at the same moment of the day, slightly different in monochrome style. The first is with the silvertone setting, the last with the dark setting on the iPhone. It changes the atmosphere completely. And one may be more beautiful than the other, it is all in the eye of the beholder.
Sometimes it just happens. You are in a place and the light is fantastic, and there is so much to frame in a photo. The sunset is spectacular and for some odd 30 minutes you are in a photography candy shop. This is a selection of what ended up on my phone on that hot August evening.
Yesterday I told you about my passion and history in monochrome. And that I do shoot sunsets in black and white. Here is another one of the same sunset, but framed different. I will publish an overview of all those shots of same sunset that evening. Each of them show a bit of it, it’s in my humble opinion nice to see the big picture.
If you did not notice, I am a big fan of monochrome. In fact, monochrome film was way back the medium I started with. It was cheap and you print your own photos in a darkroom. That was adventurous and frustrating at the same time. Not to sound old, but nowadays with wonderful software, editing images is easier, faster and more fun. And you instantly see what you get! But sometimes I do miss the anxiety of the darkroom, seeing a photo come up in the developer. Back to now. I do shoot sunsets in black and white, and here is one. The atmosphere of the shot is different, more dark and eerie.
The theme for this week LAPC 316 is ‘Destanation: Fun‘. Going to the beach is fun, but witnessing a brilliant sunset on a warm Summer evening, while a dispaly of boats and windmills complete the scene, is true fun. I published a few of them already two weeks ago (see the archive Katwijk). I hope you still have fun watching them.
The sky over The Netherlands is a wonderful object for photos, we do have lot of sky over our flat land above the low horizon. And that sky can be quite dramatic, even more in monochrome.
Drievliet is a small and very old amusement park. Over fifty years ago I first went there on a school trip. Then most of the attractions had to be moved by muscle power. Last week I had my second visit to Drievliet with our grand children. The park is dramatically changed but still has the same appeal to kids: lots of fun to be had on rides, slides, rollercoasters, ferris wheels, merrygorounds etc. And of course the fries and icecream in between. The weather was not that good, but the clouds added to the view from the ferris wheel looking at downtown Den Haag.
Building tunnels is not common in The Netherlands, the soil is mostly consisting of clay on top of a sandpackage. However, recently a new connection between motorway A4 and A44 was opened: the Corbulo Tunnel (link to a video). This is a shot from the first time I travelled throught it. The weekly LAPC #312 is sense of scale’
About the B4 retouch series: I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. Some of them are partly retouched but most do have scratches, dust and stains.
The B4 retouch series I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. All of them are not completely retouched yet. Scratches, dust and stains are not removed.
Shot with Nikon F90 on KodakTriX, scanned from film and edited using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a bigger version.
The B4 retouch series I browsed my archive for pictures to publish. All of them are not completely retouched yet. Scratches, dust and stains are not removed.
Shot with Nikon F90 on KodakTriX, scanned from film and edited using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a bigger version.
The Moon just stands there it seems, and mostly I do not pay too much attention to it. The power of the moon is enormous though, as it influences the level of the seas on Earth. At odd moments in the evening or morning I grab my camera when I spot the moon, I just can’t resist. This is one of those times, the haziness reminds me of the sand in the Sahara, the setting of Le Petit Prince, a beautiful book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Could this moon be asteroid B 612? The power of imagination, see what your eyes can not see.
LAPC 309 is about balconies. I have to admit that I do not pay special attention to balconies, unless they trigger me as I look around and they catch my eye. This in Rethymnon on Crete. My first entry was an original monochrome on film. With this one I could not decide between the original and the edited monochrome version. Hence you see them both. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.