Oscar van Alphen - Dutch photographer

Photo magazine 'Focus' in its December 2008 issue has an article on photographer Oscar van Alphen--a bit of an advertorial, since they are publishing a book about him. I did not find his documentary photos that remarkable, but was triggered by the remark that he was a pioneer because of his 'asking often fundamental questions about the medium that others found to be essential only much later'. How could I--thinking that I too am interested in the question of what does photography do?--be unaware of him?

After all, he is mentioned in the standard anthology 'Fotografen in Nederland' (not at Amazon, but sold by Proxis) and there I may find the clue why I was not triggered to his work: one of his major books is praised for being an 'associative whole' and that is the type of artistry that puts me off: I want a formal Auseinandersetzung with basic questions, even if I have to admit that photography works more directly through the senses than through formal logic and reasoning. At least you should know why it works the way it works, I'd think. Stil this Van Alphen seems an interesting guy to look into. Some of his photos from Amsterdam (oh, how 1968!) are found at the local council archive, and one of his apparently most famous installations is revived in an exhibition right now in the Rotterdam Fotomuesum.

If I find time [big if!], I'll check his basic questions (he wrote some books about photography) and then I'll come back to him in due course.

Calibration frustration

To be honest, one reason for concentrating on black-and-white prints (next to the artistic value of which I really am convinced!) was that I found my HP Photosmart Pro to make colour prints too yellowish. Yet at least the family's holiday pictures should come out in colour, right?

The camera club just bought a Colormunki, to ensure calibration of monitors as well as printers. The salesman all but promised us salvation: this was to be the ideal apparatus for the job. And X-Rite quite kindly allows you to register the Colormunki for the whole camera club, for all its computers! But first results are frustrating: far from perfect colour prints yet! Too much green now, if you'd ask me—there is change, but little improvement. And don't blame the HP printer—club-colleague Louis has similar problems with his Canon printer. We'll have to dive deeply into switches, manuals, colour spaces, etc. in the hope to find a solution...

Here's the photo I was testing with: subtle stone hues—the picture works well in black-and-white, in fact! ;-) To add to the frustration, this 2005 picture (taken in Bordeaux, France) I took to a digital demonstration day of the national photographers' association, BNAFV, a month or so later, and the guys demonstrating the Epson R1800[?] got a perfect print right from the memory card!

To be continued, I fear...

Black-and-white photographers, be free!

A simple trick I finally learned from Lightroom is how in black-and-white photography, we should feel free from the rules. Until recently, when making a black-and-white print, I started from a colour picture that was more or less optimised. Not completely finished for printing in colour, but with colours corrected, the right white balance, etc. With some (pedantic) disdain, I never used Lightroom's presets to convert that picture into black-and-white, but did so by and, fiddling carefully with the greyscale controls that work more or less like the channel mixer in Photoshop: you can control how light or dark eight parts of the spectrum (from red to yellow, to purple and magenta) will be represented. And then I'd adjust the overall contrast to get nice dark, yet sufficiently detailed shadows and good highlights. That was before LR2; since then I'd add some dashing and burning in parts of the picture.

Once I tried the LR presets though and found that they used different effects: no use of the grayscale mix at all, but simple desaturation and ruthless adjustment of exposure and white balance! I won't follow their route completely; I'll keep using the grayscale mix to have better control of how my blues (sky!), reds (skin!) and greens (plants!) are converted into tones of grey, but radically changing the white balance (usually to a low temperature setting, say 4000 K) was an eye-opener that helps to get strong effects that work well in black-and-white. For it is the effect that counts, and we are not accountable for the numbers of the colour temperature to be correct!

The photos are symbolic of 'working'--seemed fitting to today's theme. They were was taken in Hanoi, earlier this month.

Alea iacta… Another competition

Not sure if I'm testing myself or the juries, but I just sent in three photos to a national competition, the BNAFV's first-ever 'Foto Online'. At first I though I would not do it, expecting thousands of photographers to take part. But a few days ago we got a reminder saying that there were 180 participants. Well, then I could give it a go—basically with the same photos that I submitted for the regional contest less than a month ago. I redid the black-and-white one for which I got the comment that is at too grey and 'murky'; tried to strengthen the drama and contrast in the air. I still like the picture of this strange building in Almere, and am curious if I'll get similar comments from this national jury.

The other one from the regional contest that I submitted, was the allium (from our own garden, taken as a test-picture on the first evening that I had my Alpha700), again because I like it and also a little bit because someone in the audience found that it deserved a higher grade.

And you're welcome to comment too, of course!

Vaut le voyage: Berlin

No picture to stake my claim—sorry for that, folks! But my visit to Berlin this week was only for a meeting. The meeting was long, the stay was short, the weather was bad and the camera was at home. Yet even from the bus between the airport and the city centre it was more than obvious that this is a place for great photography of different types. Modern architecture on a grand scale, to begin with, of course! And many photographers know that, for in the regional competition, there were photos from the Sony office in Berlin by three contestants (one of them was awarded—too much competition for the others). The grey November day was a good backdrop for the buildings with the lights on everywhere, taking you just this step beyond standard architectural photography. Dreary days may make for good photo opportunities! And then of course the people in the streets and their ways to protect themselves from rain and cold, made up another bunch of objects for pictures.

Maybe I'll be more lucky when I go there next—or my camera club should make a trip there. Obviously, many others have done so already, but that still makes one's fingers itch: by pointing my camera a little different, by finding that great light, by releasing the shutter at exactly the right moment... We might shoot that wished-for winner!