Winter keeps going strong

_DSC6979
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

This year's winter seems to last eternally. At least it's more of a winter than we have had for a decade, and of course just when you get winterguest birds in your garden, you don't have your camera ready (4 fieldfares, in Dutch 'kramsvogels'). So you'll have to make do with an 'Image du soleil levant', the painting that sparkled off impressionism in the end of the 19th century, but then in a 21st century fashion. Keep warm!

How a Classic was Made: Moon over Hernandez

'Moon over Hernandez' is one of Ansel Adams's iconic landscape photos, and in this videoblog by Marc Silber of the Digital Photography School, Ansel's son Michael tells a little about how the picture was made. It was a shot 'at the spur of the moment', a single negative at intuitive exposure settings (he couldn't find the exposure meter!) because before Ansel could make a second one, the light in the foreground had faded. In our digital age, we could have made a dozen photos, bracketed for exposure...

But the real point was how different a straight print from the negative was from the final black-and-white print: all kinds of darkroom magic was used, for instance to make the sky darker (Adams's later prints were even more dramatic than his first published ones) and mask some clouds at the top. The video showed a whole 'storyboard' that Ansel used for a graphic depiction of all that he wanted to do when enlarging the picture--much like the different steps you would have in Lightroom, or like the different layers you would use in Photoshop.

The main lesson for us, black-and-white landscape photographers: interpret your pictures afterwards when processing it at the computer, to get the result you want. There is not a single-best conversion from the red, blue and green pixels that make up your sensor data into the black-and-white you are going to print, and 'highlighting' certain areas of your picture through software adaptations is allowed--maybe we can make our own classic!

Dundalk, earlier this year

Dundalk-1000767
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

When selecting photos for the camera club's next meeting, I stumbled upon this one. I had forgotten about it, and won't show it there, but still I think that the play of hard but curved lines is kind of neat, especially in black-and-white and, even more especially, because the curves and diagonals of the empty street are contrasted--maybe you should even say they are 'broken' by a few verticals coming from the bottom of the picture. First there is the lantern, which still belongs in the man-made hard landscaping. But then there are the three young trees. Still leafless (it was early spring), and vulnerably small. The black-and-white makes the picture a bit ominous, to my mind: will these little trees survive? Yet the natural forms against the hard lines seem to say that nature will not be subdued! And if you then look closely, there is more of nature in the picture: more planting at the bottom, and some wild grass (you cannot call it a lawn) in the top-right corner. There is hope.

Between f/2.8 and f/64 (1)

At Earthboundlight a blog entry appeared this week to answer a reader’s question: ‘Why would you want to have an f/2.8 lens?’ Bob Johnson, the author of Earthboundlight, looked at this question from the landscape photographer’s point of view. In Ansel Adams’s days, with the big plate cameras, you needed f/64 to get the ‘grand vistas’ sharp from front to end—that’s why Ansel Adams was member of the Group f/64. Current lenses ‘only’ go to f/22 (sometimes f/32), so landscape photographers tend to use those small apertures—and a tripod, because you get long exposure time at small lens openings. Luckily landscapes tend to stay in place long enough ;-)

What Johnson did not say was that at smaller formats, you get the same depth-of-field at lower aperture numbers. That is why it is so easy (relatively!) to make macro photos with compact cameras: with their tiny sensors, they get that flower detail all sharp at full opening, where a DSLR (especially a full-frame one) must stop down to f/22 to get the same. So for a landscape to be sharp from foreground to horizon, you can make do with f/22 rather than f/64 on a DSLR—if you want it all sharp.

It gives a classical look to—especially—landscape photos to have them sharp all over. Give it a sepia toning and you’d almost believe it was a 19th century picture! But most of the time, you don’t need sharpness all over to get the effect you want: selective sharpness is much more creative. You don’t need that grass and branch in the foreground to be sharp for them to have the effect of suggesting more depth to the photo with the manor house in the background.

Selective sharpness also works in close-up photos: this minuscule blueberry flower was all you need to see sharply—it conveys the spring feeling much better with the strong bokeh (‘unsharpness’) than a picture bewilderingly full of sharp details would have done.

Both these photos were taken at f/2.8—I only have one lens that opens so widely. The wide aperture has the advantage that you get more light into the viewfinder, so you see more clearly and you (or the camera) can focus more precisely. Moreover, f/2.8 often signals professional lenses, which also have other advantages, like minimum distortion of straight lines, minimum flare, minimum chromatic aberration and other flaws. Their only disadvantages are weight (that kept me from choosing one as my standard lens)—and price…

Landscape book -- little gem with flaws

A book on landscape photography is what I picked up in a 'modern antiques' bookstore ('ramsj', in Yiddish-Dutch), when my daughter drgged me into it. (A matter of self-protection, as I would be certain to come out with too many books if I let meyself loose in such a store...). It was the Dutch version of 'The World's Top Photographers - Landscapes' edited by Terry Hope. You may find little gems among the rubbish of those cheap bookstores, so do go and have a look--if you can control yourself ;-)

The book itself is still on sale in the main online bookstores (no advertisements by me; you can find your own).

It contains two spreads with a little bit of text and one to circa four photos from 38 photographers, ordered alphabetically. The photos are quite nice--'inspiring' in the not too far from true enthusiastic parlance of the Introduction--and the texts give a good impression of what it takes to be a good landscape photographer. Knowing your special corner of the world and a lot of persistence are among the key ingredients, so much is clear to me already after leafing through just a few of the photographers' little chapters.

It is only too noticeable that the book originally was published in 2003, before the digital revolution in photography. All photos are made on film (almost invariably Fuji, just a few on Kodak--I used to prefer the fuller Fuji colours, too). Of course, there still are many landscpae photographers who work on film, especially in the large cameras (4x5 inch, etc.). But many now also work digitally, and that is not found in this book. Besides, I would have liked more detailed technical information with the photos: what is the use of knowing the brand of camera or film, but not the aperture and shutter speed (plus ISO setting)? For instance, the trick of getting the 'glazed' smoothness of the sea in some photos depends on the shutter speed and then I'd like to learn if it takes 2, 20 or 200 seconds for getting that effect.

Annoying about the Dutch translation is that it was not done by a photographer, otherwise the translation of 'tripod' would not have been the literal 'driepoot' but the correct 'statief', for instance. So I found the book a gem with little flaws, but it will be useful on many rainy days for getting more inspiration!

The photo here is just a little illustration of landscape and nature photography 'learned young'. As my daughter had my DSLR, I took her picture with the small compact camera--good enough for the purpose. I tried to take care of some composition rules (object at 1/3), and felt aided by the S-curve in the park's path to suggest depth. What's the flaw in this little gem?

Hazy Sunday morning

Hazy Sunday morning
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

Found the new issue of 'Black & White Photographer' with quite a few landscape pictures (almost all of seaside locations on the British isles). That inspired me to play in Lightroom with a picture of earlier this year, and which has some water--no seaside in my neighbourhood, a ditch is all you can find here! But then again, with a few wild ducks and the haze of a Sunday morning in spring, what more do you need?

Twente landscape

High time for a drink--I had a thermos full of coffee in the rucksack. And of course no bench to be seen, but it was too cold to sit on the bare earth. Some time later, at the corner of a dirt road, a bench came in view. Finally! I did sit down, I did drink my nicely hot coffee, but hardly dared to look behind me. I was walking to enjoy the landscape of Twente, but my idea of tourism was quite different from what someone had done at that corner of the road: put his old and decrepit holiday caravan on show. For sale!

The only way to picture this, I thought, was in black-and-white and with a heavy sky (that needed some post-processing, as it really was a light-grey deck of clouds). Previsioned & executed later the same day--I just love digital photography!

Atget, Abbott and the Wonderment of Reality

Dutch TV in the early Sunday evening showed a documentary about two famous photographers of cityscapes: Eugène Atget, working in Paris around 1900-1925 and Berenice Abbott, famous for her pictures of New York in the 1930s. Abbott in fact had two careers, because she also was the one who rescued Atget's legacy of almost two thousand glass negatives. And it was Atget's photos of the disappearing old Paris around 1900 that inspired her to document the changes in New York city. The documentary showed the links, but also the differences between the two photographers: Atget as essentially a 19^th century romantic, Abbott as a 20^th century photographer who learned photography from surrealist Man Ray but who felt inspired by Atget to document New York's transformation. Some of the surrealist fascination was already visible in Atget's work, too: he made a number of photos of shop windows with reflections like the one copied here, which lookèd quite modern in the 1920s--Man Ray himself made the contact between Abbott and Atget.

Somehow both Atget and Abbott transcended the simple documenting of the old-and-the-new juxtaposed, intermingled or destroying one another. What is it that makes some photos and some photographers do that trick? I found in both of them the same things that inspire my photography (at a rather more amateurish level of course): "The real world, seen with wonderment and surprise" (Abbott writing about Atget), realising that the art of photography is "selecting what is worthwhile" (Abbott commenting on an Atget photo).

Technically, it was interesting to see how both of them worked with large plate camera's: 8"x 10" negatives to get ultimate sharpness, with flexible tilt-and-shift lenses to achieve perpendicular verticals. Digital APC-sensors are not the end of photographic evolution!

Hopefully, the documentary will appear in the Dutch public TV's archive. Give it a try; it's 45 well-spent minutes!

Winter in Holland (2)

Travelling by train, I saw beautiful trees against the blue sky; a real photographer would have made a better composition out of it, but I had just the train window to work from. And the only camera I had at the moment was my (for photography) hated mobile phone. Which I had set to small 640x480 photos "for e-mail" some time ago, by accident, making the quality of the picture even worse.

That's frustrating! Not just because of the spoiled picture, but--let's stay in reality--especially since this may be a type of winter we experience only once every umpteen years. (Unlike Romanian Krissa, who has a whole lot of really beautiful winter scenes on her blog!)

Winter in Holland

Winter in Holland, so if I'm not skating (and I have to admit to not being a great skater at all), I ought to be taking pictures of the landscape under its pristine white snowcover or with the white frost on the trees. I did, a little--work and quite simply the comfort of a warm house kept me from doing my photographic duty to more than a minimum degree. Hope you like this one of a some small garden trees with white frost in backlight. Besides, I hope to add some more to this blog and to the camera club's website in the next few days.

Well, just a quick one more: skaters in Friesland. I had previsioned this one as a black-and-white picture, but the cold blue of the ice and the little hint of green in the grass in the background do add to it! It is good to have the flexibility of choosing between black-and-white or colour in the postprocessing!

Mondriaan and Photos (1)

Months ago I mentioned Dutch 20th century painter Piet Mondriaan a few times in this blog series. Famous—or notorious?—for his ultimately abstract pictures with squares and rectangles in red, blue and yellow, what has he got to do with photography, and of landscapes to boot? That is a long story. Mondriaan (outside the Netherlands also spelled Mondrian) started out, around 1900, as a pretty conventional painter. He lived in very interesting times, however, when painting was being revolutionised, not least because of the invention of photography, over half a century before. Cézanne, whom I also mentioned a few times for his problematising the relation of the painting as a canvas with depicted reality, was only the beginning. Fauvists and Cubists followed the (post-)Expressionists and then this other Dutchman, Theo van Doesburg, invented De Stijl. Mondriaan's extremely pure application of the Stijl principles make up his most famous paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, with rectangles in only the primary colours (for paint): red, yellow and blue, on a fond of white with black stripes.

I guess that I was like many people who at first could not find any sense or beauty in these utterly abstract paintings, but after reading a little and especially after seeing—quite a few years ago now—a chronologically organised overviews exhibition of Mondriaan's paintings in The Hague, I started to find them fascinating and, yes, beautiful. The big fascination was to see Mondriaan struggle for finding beauty in the landscape and trying to express beauty without the viewer being distracted by the representation. I plan to get back to this movement later on, but let me here look at an early stage of his quest.

You can paint—or photograph, for that matter—the windmill in Domburg against the evening sky (see these and a few more of his paintings at the website of the Domburg tourist agency). Mondriaan did that in 1909 in a more or less naturalistic style (first picture), although the blue colour of the mill as a suggestion of the late evening light could not have been made ten years earlier in the history of painting. I wonder, by the way, if that blue was a correct representation of how our eyes work: in dark circumstances, the receptors for colour (cone cells) in the retina are almost inactive and we only see light-and-dark (rod cells) —any strong colouring then is fantasy, I'd say. But let's look at how he painted the same mill in 1911: against again a night-blue sky there is a red shape with details in the sky's blue (a window and the axis of the mill's wings). In the tints of blue we see a vague differentiation between sky and earth; similarly, a darker shade of red suggests some volume in the mill. This is not yet an abstract painting, but clearly Mondriaan made a lot of steps in his thoughts in those two years. No longer even an effort at more or less naturalistic colouring: the blue of the sky is way too blue for that and the earth should not be the same hue of blue and just a bit darker. And most of all, of course: the mill has turned red! We have two of his later three primary colours here, with much contrast. It is all about strong shape and strong colour; the viewer must be struck at the very first moment by a strong impression. It is not about being true to what the painter's eye saw. For me, that was the eye-opener about this painting: think of what the viewer will experience!

Bonus puzzle for you, dear readers (and to me!): interesting that Mondriaan chose to keep the sky coloured close to nature and to think that the man-made addition to the landscape was the more mutable one, of which he could change the colour. Why did he not do it the other way around: a darkish, bluish or perhaps black mill against a red sky?

Another bonus, as an aside: does Mondriaan's red mill show influence of photography in the strong perspective as if the mill was photographed through a wide-angle lens? Ans dhat about his cutting of the wings, is that not also in imitation of an 'error' of photography? Or am I anachronistically over-interpreting things here? For instance, did they have such strong wide-angle lenses in 1911?

Gained in Translation – Award Gained and Hall of Fame

Not being a native English speaker, I make my share of errors in using that language. Only recently did I learn, for instance, that my expression ‘photo club’ is not the common one—it should have been ‘camera club’. To soem extent, that would have been the better translation too! For the Photo club I belong to, often is much more of a Camera club: the guys keep talking about new cameras, selling their old gear and buying new, etc. Much less talk is about making photos. Until recently! Last club evening was surprising in that we talked about taking pictures and about how to get the best prints from them. So for the first time it really was a ‘Photo club’ rather than a ‘Camera club’—something was gained in my wrong translation!

And it seems that this attention to photos instead of cameras and other gear paid off! Because even more recently, even more was gained. For the third year in a row our camera club (let’s use the official term) took part in the regional competition for best photos and best club. The first year, 2006, I was on my own as the others who had agreed to send in some photos withdrew at the last moment. Last year, in 2007, we still had one drop-out and instead of the ten pictures, we only sent in eight. Therefore we did not qualify for the club competition. But the good news was that one of the photos was selected for the exhibition of the thirty to forty best of the region; it was Eric’s English landscape with hay stacks. But this year we had a full contribution and although most of our club’s pictures were just average, according to the jury, Louis’s ‘Escalator’ gained the award for best individual picture! It got a ‘gold sticker’, meaning it was judged ‘excellent’.

In terms of competitions, that was the best performance ever of our (dare I say it?) Photo club. The only thing that came close was my gaining a ‘silver sticker’ in a national competition with a colour slide of a landscape in Zion National Park, Utah, USA. That was back in 1992 or 1993, when we all were so much younger. And when digital photography was still much beyond our horizon. And I’m still not happy with the scan I once made of it—nothing beats the translucent quality of good old colour slides!

So here’s our Photo[!] Club’s ‘Hall of Fame’! Funny that in both pictures, patterned lines play a major role.

Autumn blues

Last weekend I walked the last stretch of the "Overijssels Havezatenpad", the long-distance walking path that made me discover a lot of landscapes near my own home over the last year and a half that I hardly knew. From the "Weerribben" I came back on the "high" land around Steenwijk. The Weerribben were boring and there even were hardly any geese or other birds to enliven the area; I definitely liked the area around Steenwijk much better, because... it looked like Twente. And I was not even born in Twente! Still I prefer the fields with trees around them and the (very) low hills to the flat wetlands. The cows were a nice welcome, as well.

On the other hand, this being the last part of the walk put me in a 'goodbye' mood, strengthened by the beginning autumn. The picture with the completely dried-out corn waiting to be harvested and the skeleton of a small windmill symbolised that autumn feeling. If you'd print it a little darker and with more saturation than the original colours, it might look like a 21st century version of Van Gogh's last painting, the one with the crows. and that association made it even more of a goodbye!

Essence of Holland

Days are getting shorter, up in the Northern hemisphere, and that also means I have little time left for blogging or for working on the pictures of today, after my walking tour of the day--35 kilometer in the area of Wieden and Weerribben, starting in the autumn mist. Kind of chilly to start your walk, but great for atmosphere in the photos. My favourite (at least when I made it) is this one of an old boat in an old canal (Arembergergracht, dug out in the 16th century, in the neighbourhood of Giethoorn, which is famous for its little canals). Parallel planes to suggest depth, the mist adds to the atmospheric perspective, and hardly any colour apart from the grass in the foreground. Essence of Holland!

Work and pleasure

Last week I was out of the country, presenting my (and my colleagues') work at two conferences. Not a minute for serious photography, only the joy of having morning coffee in a medieval Italian monastery, now the Faculty of Economics of the University of Pavia--in dire need of restauration (it's Italy, after all), but still: that is the original environment for European universities!



The joy of photogaphy came with the occasion to experiment with the A700's highest sensitivity settings: ISO 6400 and 3200, respectively (reduced jpegs of the otherwise unchanged RAW photo's). Especially ISO 6400 is close to useless; ISO 3200 is not bad for the purpose of documenting a late-evening tour of a vinyard.




And then there was the visit to the Certosa di Pavia. "ABC" in kids' jargon: Another Beautiful Church. Very beautiful, but not a place for very interesting photos. What can you add to all the beauty of the craftsmen of the 14th-16th centuries? I was reasonably satisfied with only two photos, and that for technical reasons mostly: I more or less mastered some challenges--next time I want to make some real nice pictures with that technical knowledge...

In the first, I wanted to make the craftsmen's beauty visible in a picture of a detail of a pillar plus the painted vault. To show both, I used the built-in flash of the camera with slow sync (otherwise the vault would have remained dark). The amount of light in the background satisfied me quite a lot. Of course, as a tourist on a conference, I did not come with a tripod, so the result is not quite sharp, but for a 0.7" picture it's not bad. And Lightroom 2 (great new options in this version--a must-have!) helped to sharpen it a little.
The other one, the church's facade, needed Photoshop to readjust the falling lines of the 16-mm perspective: I wanted to capture a lot of clouds above the church so in the fleeting moment when the light was right, I just had to shoot a bit upwards. When that was done, Lightroom 2 was used to make up for my lack of a gradual neutral-density filter; one of Lr2's new options is the 'graduated filter' and that helped to bring the picture back to the impression that the situation had made in reality.

Composition with balls?

Sometimes, I don't quite know what to do with a photo. Take this one. I was attracted by the bunch of balls lying on the training field--the sportsmen and -women were probably gone for a break, or the trainer was preparing for the next bunch of kids coming. It was a funny picure, I thought, with the uniform green (artificial 'grass'), straight lines and the random composition of balls. But due to practical limitations (I had to take my pictures from the outside of the terrain, from the sidewalk in the street), I could not get a shot without the messy surroundings of the border of the field, stuff lying around, etc. And now I'm stuck for good ideas: how to maintain the feel of the area, and yet make it better than this messy snapshot? Cropping does not work well, I think, and that is the only trick I can think of. But I want to keep that one ball in the background, which gives some feeling of depth, or continuity that helps to make it authentic rather than a purpose-made composition. Wish I could go back, but the summer season is over around here, and anyway another time the trainer will not have had the same luck with his random throwing around of the balls.
If I succeed in making a better picture out of it, I'll let you know! Just remind me if I forget...

2D pictures in a 3D world

A picture is a two-dimensional rendering of the three-dimensional world that we see. The painter credited with being the first to focus on that reduction of the world to a flat canvas was Paul Cézanne. I very much like his landscapes, where he expresses that realisation quite well. For instance the one to the right: 'This is not a tree, but these are strokes of paint on a canvas, giving the viewer an impression of a tree', he seems to say. From him I learned that perspective in a picture is an illusion and I started to forego perspective quite often.

My current PC-desktop wallpaper is an example of that. A picture from the 'expedition' to Almere some months ago: no depth thanks to the stone wall filling the whole background. On the other hand, the tree stem and the shadow on the stone wall give some illusion of depth. And of course (a little 'sinplicity' again): the shadow does not match the tree. At first sight you should think it is, then come to realise that the two don't match. The shadow is of a lantern, and the light does not come from the left but from the right.

Zen and the art of landscape photography

The title's joke is over 30 years old now, as Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance' dates from the early 1970s. And there must be hundreds of variants of 'Zen and...' by now. And still it gives the best possible introduction to my theme of today--sorry it's been so long since I wrote, but you know how it is with holidays: it's a time of fun but not a time for serious photography. And time is the essence--the essence of Zen and the essence of photography. Well, of landscape photography anyway. Or maybe I'd better say the negation of time. As Pirsig had it, in his book: when he wanted to get a motorcycle in the 1960s, they were not to be had in the USA, and he ordered a self-assembly kit motorbike in Japan. The manual for putting the thing together was--as then and now only too usual--badly translated. It said that the assembly of the bike "needs great peace of mind". This meant, of course, "needs patience". But on another level the bad translation was perfect: you do need "great peace of mind" to achieve something good.

So to make a good landscape picture you need to take time, a lot of time. The point is not if your shutter speed is 1/2000 of a second. The time I mean is time you take to get a feel that says "this is the picture to take". That message was brought home in an interview in the August copy of Outdoor Photography with Anna Booth, who is an amateur photographer like the rest of us. Yet unlike, for she will be exhibiting 4 by 5 foot (1.2 by 1.5 meter) pictures in the UK. (That is what the magazine promises--the gallery's website is not running yet.) And the pictures shown in the magazine I find stunning: simple colours, simple patterns of landscape details, and all amazingly sharp. Even in the magazine reproductions you can see that. The sharpness comes from her pictures being taken with a 5x4 inch camera, with real film of course, nothing digital. The magic is not so much in film vs. digital, but in the time needed. You must take time to carry such a big camera around, to set it up on its tripod, and to make sure that everything is correct before you risk to spend a large sheet of film material on a picture. The bulkiness of the camera--and Anna's own personality, as she says--ensure that she concentrates often on a single spot: "I get hours of pleasure from a single location and, sometime, one shot". OK, looking around at one spot is a bit of "peace of mind", but the really interesting remark she makes is that: "it usually takes me a couple of days, before I can start to see any images." She must reach a state of "peace of mind" before she can really concentrate enough--and then a split second can be enough for the shutter to do its part of the work.

You see now why in this time of year I cannot take serious pictures? Worse than that: do I ever take the time to really let my mind get "peace" in order to become receptive to my environment in a photographic way? On the other hand: do you really need very much time to reach the right, receptive stage of mind? In a tour I did, early this year, of the Buddhist Chung Tai Chan monastery in Taiwan, the nun who showed us around (she is in the picture to the right) told us that an experienced person can meditate in every circumstance and at any time. It is only us, beginners, she added, who need mantras, mandalas, monasteries. The really experienced photographers may see their picture at once, may be able to visualise (to use Ansel Adam's term) anytime and anywhere. I am like Anna Booth and need time to free my mind from other things to be able to concentrate on the landscape.

The contrast between reaching "great peace of mind" and the split-second action of photography is much like the "way" of Japanese archery, kyudo. Once you have reached the right state of mind, and you master your bow/camera to perfection, making a hit/perfect picture becomes natural, effortless, and certain. Keep trying! One day everything will come together.

And then you will be able to make a much better version of my try of the spirit of the landscape at the foot of Mount Fuji. Until then: enjoy this one!

Whatever happened to ... Martin Kers? And the story of two fallen slides

Didn't write a thing for two weeks and now two in an hour!

Writing about Gerco de Ruijter made me think of the famous landscape photographer of a decade (or two) ago, Martin Kers. What is he up to, nowadays? His website is there, but does not seem to have much that is new. Or am I wrong? If you know, please leave a comment! For I liked some of his photos a lot.

I once saw him in real life, when he gave a presentation with slides for a photo club in Hengelo--obviously, this was before digital photography. The lesson I remember from that presentation was: if you don't need a horizon, don't take it. Zoom in to what is essential in your landscape picture. That's a lesson I took to heart. In fact I already did that sometimes before I heard him say so, but not so consciously. The photo here is one of a later time (a hillside in Portugal, 1995), when I was conscious of leaving out the horizon.

After his presentation, Kers invited amateur photographers in the audience to give him some landscape slides to comment upon. He got a lot of them, commented on them even though they were mostly not landscapes and quite often of a quality that made me feel embarrassed. And of course there were a number of cases when the slides were projected upside down, so they had to be taken out,inserted again in the right way, etc., etc. Mr. Kers was getting annoyed and had had his fill of this amateurish stuff. I could easily notice that, as I was standing at the ack of the hall, only a few metres from the projector and Mr. Kers.
I had brought only two photos, real landscapes, and really good ones, from a trip to the Southwest of the USA, and I felt pretty sure that he would like them. (I really should scan those old slides! I need a vacation, no a sabattical, or the jackpot of the lottery!)
But then fate struck: the last magazine of slides, with only my two slides in it, fell to the ground and that did it for Mr. Kers. He did not want to pick them up, try to dfind out what was right-side up, and then comment on two more most probably (in his thought) mediocre slides. I was not close enough (nor brave enough) to try to convince him otherwise. So I'll never know if those two slides were really as good as I thought.

Landscape is hot

It's summer (in our Northern hemisphere), but that is not what makes the landscape hot--or: it's not the only thing that makes the landscape hot. There also is a lot of interest in the landscape, including the landscape in the Netherlands. At least that is what my newspaper says. Journalist and historian Jan Blokker is my source, and his sources are several books as well as the theme of the First International Triennial in Apeldoorn: 'Nature as artifice'. For the Dutch landscape, although enjoyed and heralded as 'nature' is largely 'artifice'--and changing at that! Rightly, Blokker writes that the Dutch landscape keeps changing. What our grandparents saw, was very different from what our famous 17th century painters saw, and we we see is vastly different again. In his article (alas not [yet?] online in the NRC Handelsblad site), two pictures are reproduced from re-issues books by Cas Oorthuys--more like our fathers' generation--and mention is made of Gerco de Ruyter--a current photographer. Now that is landscape as I like it! In one of the books Blokker reviewed, De Ruijter is characterized as someone who 'most loves pictures that seem abstract but that are composed of recognisable elements on second view' [my translation]. Have a look at his website to see what that means! He is the guy who invented the camera-kite and to take random(?) landscape pictures.

That made me remember one of the pictures from my balloon trip this May--not made random but very much on purpose and very much with the abstraction idea in mind. Dutch landscape, especially when shaped by humans, is a Mondriaan painting (Blokker referred to the famous painter, too) and all you need to do to make it a modern version of Mondriaan is ensure that the lines are not vertical/horizontal but have a bit of a diagonal slant. Mondriaan would not like it for it is not 'pure' enough, but I think that my picture here does capture the Dutch landscape, Mondriaan's spirit, and Gerco de Ruyter's as well. Wish he saw it!

At the same time, it is also a picture of the changing landscape in our time: the plastic on the field to protect the young crop is something our parents and grandparents would not have seen. And what about our children and grandchildren? Moreover, there is change at a smaller scale: some of the fields are still bare but the top-left bit has some beginning growth in green. That was spring arriving.


By the way, the book supplement of the NRC Handelsblad containing Blokker's reviews opened with a tremendous picture of a volcano--impossible to take a photo like that in Holland. With a little searching I found the source of the photo and the name of the volcano, the Tungurahua in Ecuador. the photo seems to be in the public domain, so I don't hesitate to copy it. The contrast of the lava on fire, the cold starry night, the white cloud and the black fume! Nothing abstract about it, no strange perspective, but pure nature that needs no artifice.