Berlin by iPhone

I've added the first gallery of photos taken with the iPhone to the Always Arriving site. It consists of urban photos taken around Berlin and can be accessed via the Urban page.

All photos were edited on the iPhone using various apps, primarily Photogene, Camerabag and Tiltshift Generator.

iPhoneography

The web is full of it. Just google 'iphoneography' and you'll see. Everyone who owns an iphone, it seems, takes photos with it, and then publishes them.

And so do I.

What started as a way of fooling around with a camera that is really quite shabby, and a bunch of apps that are fun and that manage to turn crappie photos into half decent results, has ended up being a nice little pastime. Some people have classified the iphone's camera as another toy camera, and somehow it is. Not surprisingly, many of the apps out there turn the photos into Holga, Lomo or polaroid-style pix. It's like having your own little photoshop with you. I take a photo on my way to work, and before I reach work, I have it edited and applied filters, and even posted it if I so choose.

As I said, it's fun. It's not nearly professional, and when the photos are viewed blown up, the limits of the camera and of the apps show. However, people have managed to create great results, and maybe sometime I'll put together a few links of the galleries I like best.

But for now, here are mine: Seasons of Glass is a photoblog of sorts. I post one photo a day (well so far I have, I'm at day 18 now). I'm hoping to keep it going for a while. At least as long as I feel that quality still outweighs the quantity. It's a great little exercise, 'though, to capture one shot a day that is worth posting. You're the judge if it worked or not.

Enjoy.

Autumn Beaches

There is nothing moodier in my mind than a beach on a windy autumn day. Well, we had plenty of those a couple of weeks ago on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen. We basically had the last of the nice autumn days giving way to the rain and the cold of the winter to come.

I just posted a selection of black & white photographs which I took on Ruegen with my Diana+ camera on the toycamera page.

One picture, which I called A Storm is Gathering, has a sad side-story to it. About ten minutes after I took it, a young man jumped from the pier on which I took the photo into the sea. We didn't see it happen, but we saw the rescue effort (involving boats and helicopter) and finally watched the man being pulled from the sea, dead. It had a dampening effect on our mood, as can be expected; events like those are, after all, very powerful reminders of one's own mortality.

The Last Pictures of Summer

During the last week of September, which turned out to be the last week of summer, I shot a couple more rolls with the wide angle Holga, the 120WPC. I've uploaded a few to my Holga page (check the Wide Angle Berlin link) and a few more to the flickr gallery. Enjoy.

Rundfunkhaus - the Former East German House of Broadcasting

Once a year, Berlin holds an Open Day for memorials and other historic sites which are normally closed to the public; which is normally a good time to discover new sites in (or new sides to) Berlin. This year, we visited the former East German House of Broadcasting ('Rundfunkhaus') where pretty much all of the GDR's radio broadcasts were produced.

Large parts of the house are still in use, not for broadcasting but for sound recording - although it does not seem to be as successful a venture as the new private investors are hoping for. While some of the outlying buildings have been left to fall to pieces, being open to the elements and having been vandalised, the main buildings are intact, in pretty much the state they were in when the Berlin wall came down. The house features vintage GDR design, which always harks back to the 1950s. The highlight is certainly the Great Broadcasting Hall, a grand studio where orchestral music could be recorded.

I took a series of digital snapshots (the Holgas stayed home that day) which I put up [here] on my 'other', more pedestrian site, Incidental Images. Enjoy.

Mysore and Bangalore

I mentioned earlier in the blog that I shot but four rolls of film on my recent trip to India. Here then is a selection of the photos I took; most of them are from Mysore and some from Bangalore. I used both a Holga and a Diana+ camera.

The gallery is available from the Holga page.

Berlin Wide Angle

A selection of photographs taken with the wide angle pinhole Holga 120WPC camera is now up on the Always Arriving site.

The gallery can be accessed from the Holga and from the Urban page.