Travel has taught me to be bold and kind to try and make contact and produce the photos you really want. But sometimes you have to pay money as well. A family portrait on high altitude (5000 meters) in the Himalay on Karo La. Part of a family that lived on the pass, with a yak, a goat and dogs. This week’s theme for the Lens Artists Photo Challenge #184 is ‘Travel has taught me’.
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 and Marksta. Click the picture for a bigger version
Mona Lisa is one of the most famous and genius works of art in the world. I was lucky to view it for the first time when the Louvre was not modernized. On a Monday morning in February 1984 me and a friend were the only persons in the room to admire her mysterious smile. In 2008 I saw her again from a distance, in a sea of pressing people, holding up phones and camera’s to get a glimpse of her. I have not been there since, but I can imagine what it must look like on a normal day before the pandemic. A wave of smartphones will be raised towards her, in a never ending stream of people on visiting times of the Louvre. Apparently 80% of the visitors of the Louvre come to see her.
I read in an article that at present people seek personal attention in combination with important objects and/or moments. A selfie is the instrument to gain that attention on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or Tiktok. Mona Lisa/Lisa Gherardini never wanted that attention, a brilliant artist painted her portrait. And the rest is history. She must feel lonely now, no one is coming to see her. Or is she finally getting her well deserved rest.
Le Mont Saint Michel is an old village on a rock in a bay on the west of France in Brittany. It is positioned in between Normandy and Brittany, and is famous for its abbey.
Wishing you all a wonderful, happy, healthy and inspirational new year. I hope we are able to travel more, be near to loved ones and friends and enjoy the world and our communities in more harmony together.
Before the pandemic I used to cross this canal twice a day, and I took loads of photos of it, but just recently I found out about its history and historical purpose.
As most of you probably know the Dutch have a long relationship with water, and learned how water could be managed over the ages. About half of The Netherlands is below sea level; the question was and is how to keep it dry? Some say that God created the world but the Dutch created The Netherlands. In reality we manage water. In days of climate change that gets more complex. Not only the amount of water coming in by rivers and rain is growing, the soil of The Netherlands sinks as well.
In 1840 this canal was build. From 1848 the former lake the Haarlemmermeer was turned into the Haarlemmermeerpolder and this canal was used to dump the water of that lake into the North Sea. Schiphol (ship hell) was a spot in that former lake notorious for ship wrecks as the story goes.
Nowadays the canal takes out the water from the West of The Netherlands to the sea at Katwijk.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge #172 is a day of my week. The photo above was one of a series I took during a morning when I visited a little village in Norfolk, Wells next the Sea. From the dock the view on the low tide coastline was amazing: boats, gulls, water, sun and clouds. It felt like a photographer heaven where there is too much to shoot in a short time. So this week I publish some of the photo’s from that morning in September.
The theme for this week’s Lens-artists Photo Challenge #176 is One image/one story. That theme matches the subject 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! But a film needed to be developed, and sometimes I could not create the envisioned result in my darkroom. Nowadays you lust 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.
Photography is about seeing, observing the world. And be ready for the decisive moment as Henri Cartier-Bresson said. My photo’s are my story of the world, my way of giving ‘voice’ to something that made me press the shutter, that reflects inside me. That is extremely subjective. But I learned (via this blog and other feed back) that my story most of the times is different from the one of spectators. My story is not their story. So, what’s behind this photo?
Martin Parr is in my humble opinion a brilliant satirist of the wealthy world. I enjoy his pictures of people, showing how human they are in their environment and behavior. And sitting in a holiday trailer park I was wondering what would be a way of framing what that park meant to me. All the trailers look the same, so I pictured a small bit. With the sky. A holiday at the sea in a trailer park. Hopefully with blue skies.
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.
The picture was originally shot with Pentax K1000 on Kodak Plusx, scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger 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.
The picture was originally shot with Pentax K1000 on Kodak Plusx, scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger 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.
The picture was originally shot with Pentax K1000 on Kodak Plusx, scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger version.
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 picture was originally shot with Pentax K1000 on Kodak Plusx, scanned from negative and tweaked using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a larger version.
This week’s Lens Artists Photo Challenge (#162) is ‘all about the light’. Maybe not a photo you would expcect when it is about ‘light’. But it is. I always love reading quotes from people on blogs, but I am too lazy to look up this one. Someone said: photography is painting with light. Which is true basically, glass, metal or later film was made to be sensitive to light to store images. Sensors do the same, but we are not aware of that process. Just the result. Last weeks I was looking at the sky more and more because a friend (I call him a friend even though I have not yet him personally for our first beer) Andy Townend ‘shoots a sky a day’ on his Facebook and IG account. A sky with clouds is a painting in light. I long to see blue skies, it is too wet and grey this Summer.
In Domfront in Normandy they show old knights and medeaval games to tourists in Summer, in a superb backdrop of the old town. That delivers contrasting images.
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 and Marksta. Click the picture for a bigger version