“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.” – Thomas Mann
Photos: click for larger sample
Experimenting with the 6x17 format
Regular 2x3 format
Experimenting with 4x5 format
Experimenting with 6x17 format
Failure to fall within the 6x17 format
Experimenting with 6x17 format
Regular 2x3 format
Regular 2x3 format
Back in August I sold one of my lenses to fund a new one and last week it finally arrived: the Zeiss 35mm F1.4 Distagon. The lens is quite special. Not bitingly sharp wide open and also not very contrasty. But from F2.8 onwards, this changes drastically. As such this lens has the attributes of a portrait lens (lower contrast at wide apertures is good for people’s faces) ánd a landscape lens at smaller apertures.
Included in this post are some samples.The first one is taken at a lake in Kessel-Lo, the others are from a short stay in Rixensart this weekend.
Handheld wide open landscape shot
Farmers' golf (?)
In the hotel
Wall painting
Unedited picture of me
Biting contrast and colors
Elements
Contrast and colors again
At the end of August, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) organized their 6th annual conference in Reykjavik. Perhaps partly due to the exotic location, the conference was a huge success with approximately 2500 participants. One of those was me, presenting a formal model on the role of oversight committees in closed rule legislation.
Reykjavik itself is quite small. Too small for a city trip. However, it functions quite well as a base to discover the rest of the island that is Iceland. I only got to take one tour, which I wouldn’t recommend, but other conference participants were able to see very different landscapes, ranging from glaciers to hot springs. Nonetheless, Reykjavik is a great place to spend a day. Maybe my sensitivity to them is due to my trip to Cologne (Köln) with Karolien for Libelle, but the great number of trendy concept stores surprised me.
Below you can find some pictures that I think convey the feeling of being in Reykjavik. I mostly used my Zeiss 100mm F2 to capture the town’s great variety of colors (that are unfortunately best displayed in ProPhotoRGB, not in the web’s sRGB). An added bonus of this lens is the incredibly low level of distortion that could otherwise make an image such as the red wall with white window much less powerful.
An academic on his way to the conference
A Mondriaan in the making
Where the twain have met in 1986
Uplifting Reykjavik
A very nice church
Preparing for the Winter
A typical window in the city center
Icelandic conversations
Streetview
Continuity
In the beginning of the Summer, Karolien was asked by Libelle, her employer, to visit Cologne and write an article emphasizing the trendy side of this former Roman colony (where it derives its name from). And I got to join her and take the pictures. Now the article has appeared and I can safely post these photos.
For fellow photographers: most of my keeper shots were taken with the two Carl Zeiss lenses I brought. I used the Carl Zeiss 100mm F2 Makro-Planar exclusively as a tele and for the close up pictures. I preferred the Carl Zeiss 35mm F2 Distagon for almost all atmospheric pictures. The first one below really shows of the great colors and contrast that can be achieved with it. I’m also particularly pleased with the rendering in the picture of Karolien sitting on her bike. Judge for yourself.
Discovering the city
Love your city
Outdoorsy
Taking a tour with an iGuide
Eat out in Pepe's, in the Belgian quarter
Pepe has incredible food
We stayed in quite the trendy hotel
Our hotel's bar
Tear down this wall!
Museum Ludwig
The Dom in the digital era
The new harbor
The chocolat museum
City near the Rhine
Discovering Cologne by bike
Discovering the old and new Cologne by bike
Trendy cup cakes
Plenty of concept stores
In 2003, Barry Schwartz wrote a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. It provides an insight in the psychological effects of having too much choice and how utility diminishes if the number of options increases beyond a particular (personal) threshold.
It was this book I had on my mind when I was going through the first batch of pictures from my recent road trip. And yet, of all the pictures I took (well over 2500) and all the pictures Karolien took (almost 1000), I managed to select just over 500 for potential visitors to see. In writing the most important action is erasing, and in photography this wisdom seems to apply as well.
The most difficult task, however, is to select pictures for the blog. When I started blogging, I set myself a limit of 10 pictures, yet I frequently broke my own rule. Today I will try to confine myself to only 10 pictures (the rest can be seen on my Flickr page if desired). It seems that I liked Yellowstone the most.
As a special treat, all pictures can be clicked on for a larger than usual version. Landscapes need to be seen large to be appreciated.
The Rocky Mountains
On the road
Mount Rushmore
Badlands National Park
Yellowstone
Yellowstone
Quite the scene in Yellowstone
Yellowstone
Yellowstone
Delicate Arch, Arches NP
In the absence of sufficient introduction time, let’s pick up right where we left it our previous blog post: our trip to Yellowstone National Park. What an adventure! We were so thrilled the first time we saw a bison (which was actually on the road right after the Park’s entrance), and afterwards we saw maybe 50 more. In addition we spotted a grizzly bear and two black bears, one of which looked after a cub.
Yellowstone is the most impressive National Park we visited so far. And that includes our previous West Coast road trip as well. The sheer amount of wildlife combined with ever-changing sceneries made for many breathless moments.
This trip is also more adventurous as the last one. Things do go wrong and after driving through a pothole in the road, a front tire ran flat. I never changed a tire before, but fortunately a ranger pulled over and gave me instructions on how to do it. The spare tire we had in our trunk was a emergency-only tire, with a speed limit of 50 mph. We had to leave Yellowstone and went to Gardiner (Montana) to find a replacement. We had the tire repaired, payed only 20 dollars for it, and where back at the pothole, all in under 1.5 hours!
I do find sharing photos more difficult than before. Not only is it harder to assess the pictures on this laptop screen (instead of on the computer at home), but sharing too much will leave me with less stories to tell afterwards. I hope I found the correct balance, here.
Today we drive to Salt Lake City (Utah). We both look forward to see a city again.
Below you can find some pictures of Yellowstone NP.
Mammoth Hot Springs
Mammoth Hot Springs, again
Cloud factories, that are geyzers
Green vegetation
Old Faithful, moments before eruption
An erupting Old Faithful
Typical hot springs in Yellowstone
A geyzer in "constant eruption", I do wonder how that's possible
We landed in Denver on June the 2nd, after a layover in Newark. At the US customs clearance we got asked about our reason of visit and what we planned to see. “The Rocky Mountains?! Be prepared to be out of breath quite often at that altitude”, the officer said. I replied that we expected to be out of breath regardless of altitude, seeing that we are on our honeymoon.
And boy, have we been out of breath. With awe, people. With awe. Denver was a “cleaner” city than we anticipated. It seems it is recipient of a lot of new investments, leading to new and modern buildings and monuments. Of course we went to see the classics as well: the capitol hill building where we took a great tour, the convention center with the blue bear and the student union building. At the capitol hill we even saw the Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and I got my picture taken with him.
After our visit to the mile high city that is Denver, we drove to Grand Lake which forms the western gate to the Rocky Mountains. The normal way to go from Denver to the Rocky Mountains is via the east, but I read somewhere that the west entrance was more beautiful. After spending the night in Grand Lake (which has a nice lake), we were told at the Rocky Mountain entrance that the main road was closed due to a rockfall. That’s what happens in the Rockies. But this meant that instead of taking a relatively short scenic road to the other side of the park, we had to take a four hour detour around it. That’s what happens on road trips. We still made it and went to see some of the park that day.
The day after we rose early, planning to climb deer mountain in Rocky Mountain NP. At 7.15am we were hiking and around 9ish we enjoyed a view we worked hard for. The climb was made difficult because of the high altitude and its steep course. This was what the official at the customs clearance warned us about.
In spite of the name deer mountain, we never saw any deer on the mountain (we did see a lot of their feces, though). However, over our trip so far, we have seen plenty of animals: deer, elk, moose, a coyote, buffalo, a turtle, prairie dogs, a skunk and bighorn sheep. All in the wild.
Yesterday we went to visit Mount Rushmore and Badlands National Park. To be honest, we both had low expectations. Yet we were pleasantly surprised, especially by Mount Rushmore. What a great monument it is! We took an audio tour and it was fascinating to hear about the political economy of building such a monument. Most people there were American tourists and somehow I felt one of them. In Badlands we waited for the sunset, but cloudy weather denied us the soft and rich color schemes we hoped for.
We are currently staying in Rapid City (it is morning here) and will be leaving for Yellowstone soon. We planned nothing today except driving. But with all the cds we made, it will be a pleasant experience nonetheless.
Below you can find some unedited pictures of our trip so far.
Denver, the mile high city
The blue bear of Denver
Me and John Hickenlooper, the Colorade Governor
The lake at Grand Lake
An early rise in Rocky Mountain NP
Room for a view
It IS a road trip, after all
Mount Rushmore
Over the past weeks, I tried to focus more on portraits to improve my photography in that domain. I am very bad at posing people, so all shots are “candid portraits”: people may have been aware of the fact that I took a photograph (in contrast to my usual picture taking), but I did not pose them.
The selection below are pictures of children. I often read that using a manual focus lens is not the correct way to take pictures of children, as they cannot sit still. While I do not claim that action shots can always be achieved by manual focus (I used an autofocus lens for the last picture, which I surely could not have made with my manual focus lenses), the color and contrast of the zeiss manual focus lenses more than make up the few misses I get.
A natural posing talent
This one looks much better in ProPhoto RGB
Family
Family fun
Saturday April 2, I got up early to document a morning at a farm in Limburg. These farmers have held cows for decades, but anticipating their retirement, they will let them go the following summer and focus on growing crops for the next few years.
Every morning of every day of every week of every year of every decade, they get up to milk the cows in the morning and they have to be back home in the evening to milk them again. Even considering the challenging physical labor, this is what makes me respect farmers the most: how inescapable their job is.
Below you can find a series of pictures that tell the story of that morning. Last blog post I talked about my technique and the gear I used for it. Three main lenses were used: the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2 and 100mm f2, and the the Canon 50mm f1.2. I had to include the 50mm since farmers get up very early, and thus low light was a serious issue. The f1.2 aperture sucked in the light: the first picture of the series shows more detail than I could see with my own eyes. The Zeiss lenses were a little too slow to use from the beginning. They have faster lenses in their lens gamma that must be amazing for my style of photography, such as the 35mm f1.4 but I do not own them. As soon as light permitted, I switched my Canon out for the Zeiss’ ones.
Rise and shine
Cleaning out the milk area
Cleaning out the stables
Prepping
Send in the cows
Milk machines
Still early
He's a craftsman
Enormous amounts of cleaning on a farm
Still early
Four helping hands
Cleaning
Cats
After cleaning: check up on the cows
More cleaning
Taking care of his guests
Euhm ... cleaning again
... and again
She looked like a cow
Hurrying, always
Taking out the horse
Like a dove amongst the crows
Prepping the food
Portrait of a queen
Finished feeding the cows
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to do document a particular morning. A morning that I will elaborate on in one of my next blog posts. What I want to write about today, are the techniques and some of the equipment involved in documenting events.
A first personal rule of documentary photography is to let things happen. Never interfere. Follow your subjects through their activities and observe them from the background. Very few photographers seem to do this anymore. I hate going to weddings and hearing the photographer say “can you do that again”, “ah, hold that pose”, or “please stand still for a second”. The photographer is not longer documenting moments, he is creating them. Documentaries of weddings or other events should reflect the day as such. Not how the photographer interprets it. There is already enough room for photographers to have a point of view: choosing the perspective, choosing the framing – who is in, who is out – and choosing the lighting. He must not interfere with the moment.
The second rule follows up on the first one. It is not because a photographer is discreet, that he should just walk around and shoot pictures. Deliberateness cannot be overemphasized. Using the ears is as important as using the eyes when it comes to documentaries. Who is going to do what, where and especially when. Trying to gain insight into the process the subjects are involved in is very important to predict and anticipate.
These two rules I am very aware of when going out on assignment. The second rule also determines my choice of equipment. Zoom lenses are fantastic if you have no clue with regards to what will happen. For some photojournalists (especially in war settings) being able to switch perspectives instantaneously is imperative. For me and what I do, anticipation is much more feasible. Therefore I prefer to use prime lenses. They cannot zoom, but are often much more light sensitive (so they can be used in much dimmer locations), have higher image quality and are often somewhat lighter. And, they force me to obey rule number two.
My current camera is a Canon, but my favorite lens brand is Carl Zeiss. The quality of the lenses are astoundingly high. Especially with regards to micro-contrast. This is not the usual contrast that you can emulate and increase in software, but determines how 3D a picture looks. A well known downside of Zeiss lenses are the lack of auto-focus capabilities. Therefore many photographers claim that these world class optics can only be used in studios or for landscapes, not for documentaries where fast paced action warrants auto-focus lenses. I disagree. When you respect rule number two, manual focus lenses (which are MUCH easier to focus manually than auto-focus ones) can produce great results. And, again, they force you to obey rule number two.
Below you can find an example of a picture I took using a manual focus lens. The Zeiss 35mm f2 Distagon, to be exact. The picture shows a farmer walking hurriedly from one place to another, with a broom in his hand. A tough subject, indeed. He was constantly walking around, with me tracking him. But I anticipated what he was going to do, got ready and let the moment happen. The picture now conveys the hectic morning perfectly.
In the future I hope to show you the charm of Zeiss lenses in more detail and explain how they help me to be true to my two rules. They are great optical wonders and (especially the f1.4 models) are very useful for documentary photography.
on the move
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