Always Arriving - News & Updates

Videos

2011-12-28T14:19:00.000+01:00

I added a selection of the video works which I made over the years to the Vimeo site, and added a page with the embedded videos to my site. Click here to view.

A Wedding in Mumbai

2011-12-17T17:41:00.000+01:00

In late Novembre I spent some time in Mumbai, attending the wedding of my friend Akash and his girl-friend Shree. I brought back a bunch of photos from the event which took place over multiple days. A selection of these photos can be found here.

Additionally, I posted another set of photos taken around Mumbai. Entitled Streets of Mumbai, this set features mostly photos taken with my Holga cameras.

Overall it was great being back in India. Staying with my friend's family gave me a totally new perspective in Indian life and culture. I also had tons of fun (and good food), and made new friends along the way. So, yes, I keep being a great fan of that country.

I've also reorganized the photos from the past trips to India into a new gallery so that all India photos are now in one place.

Enjoy!

I'm on Google+ now...

2011-09-21T22:21:00.000+02:00

If you'd like to follow me on Google+, click here.

New Layout

2011-08-21T10:12:00.001+02:00

I have updated the layout of the web site, reverting to a white on black look. Most importantly, the way the photographs are presented has been improved, using a slideshow type interface that is easier to navigate and looks better. It doesn't use Flash, so it works and looks great on iPad and iPhone as well. Enjoy.

Rome

2011-07-18T08:53:00.001+02:00

Added a whole section of set with photographs taken in Rome last June. They include a couple of sets of street photography taken with Holga cameras, and another one taken with the iphone. One set deals specifically with the Roman ruins around the city, and another one with pictures shot inside the many museums of Rome [Click here to view].

[01Aug2010: Rome sets also available in the Holga gallery]

Berlin Christopher Street Day 2011

2011-07-07T18:29:00.001+02:00

Gallery with b&w and colour Holga photos from the recent Christopher Street Day parade in Berlin now up [click here].

Passengers Part 2

2011-03-12T12:22:00.001+01:00

Added a new set of photographs taken on the subways, airplanes and trains (as well as airports and train stations): Passengers (2). And there are also several new photos in the Playing in the Streets set. Enjoy.

Interview on HolgaDirect

2011-02-25T17:42:00.001+01:00

The Holga-themed website HolgaDirect is featuring an interview with me. Click here to read.
Oh, and you can win a print of one of my pics if you are within the 50 first persons to re-tweet the article. So go for it.

New Holga Sets up

2011-02-06T19:20:00.001+01:00

I'm in the process of re-designing the remainder of the Always Arriving site, the Holga section. Since this may take some time yet, I decided to already add a few new sets in the revised layout. Included are new photographs from Vietnam, Paris, Berlin in the Fall and Bangalore, India.

"Analogue Daydreams" video now on HolgaDirect

2011-02-05T14:36:00.001+01:00

The video Analogue Daydreams, which includes an interview of myself and another Berlin based Holga photographer, Mathias Meyer, is now also online on the HolgaDirect website.
The video is by Jim Elson. More of his video works can be found here.

Faces of Vietnam

2011-01-21T08:05:00.002+01:00

I've uploaded the first set of photos from Vietnam. Entitled Faces of Vietnam, it contains people photographs from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Halong Bay and Mui Ne, shot on a Holga and an iPhone.

Urban Section Redesigned

2011-01-21T08:02:00.000+01:00

The re-design and re-organisation of the Urban section is now finished. There are a few new sections as well: Building for Utopia showcases surrealism in architecture; Paris B&W contains black & white wide-angle photos taken with the Holga 120WPC, and the two Where Angels Tread sets feature images of cemeteries. Enjoy.

New Urban iPhone Photographs

2010-12-07T22:48:00.004+01:00

I've added a whole section of iPhone photographs to the Urban gallery with a series of recent photos, mostly from Berlin.
Additionally, I added a few sets of photos taken in Paris.

The 365 Project is now finished

2010-11-09T22:42:00.001+01:00

Last Saturday I posted the last image for my 365 project, Seasons of Glass. One iPhone image a day for a full year, starting it on the very day I got my iPhone. Read here a summary of what it was like.

The blog will continue, although I will no longer be posting on a daily basis.

People Section Redesigned

2010-11-03T17:08:00.004+01:00

I am currently in the process of redesigning the whole Always Arriving site. The first part is finished, the People section, which I just uploaded. Please check it out: www.gheedon.com/People .

The new look and feel is a lot different from the old one. Rather than re-develop everything from scratch with lots of self-made javascript code, I decided to use RapidWeaver, a web editor which comes complete with templates. All I needed to do was set up a CSS file to render fonts and colours the way I prefer them. As to setting up the galleries, I can do that in iPhoto and simply import them into RapidWeaver. No more resizing photos and creating thumbnails by hand... . Ok, you do give up a certain amount of freedom in design, but the time gained is formidable.

And the nice thing: the pages also look great on the iPhone and iPad (and hopefully, other mobile devices as well).

I will continue with the redesign; the Urban section is next. I'm keeping the Holga section for last, seeing that it is the largest one.

Enjoy viewing the photos and let me know what you think - feedback is welcome.

Living in Whitefield

2010-07-29T21:40:00.000+02:00

I recently returned to Bangalore, India for the fourth time in less than a year. A heavy work load meant that I had less time to check out the city, but as I have pretty much seen every sight twice over, that was alright. Instead I spent some time walking around the neighbourhood where I was staying, which is out in the Whitefield suburb where most of the IT companies are located. The neighbourhood is a working class district around which the glass palaces of the IT companies are growing like mushrooms. To a degree it felt very rural: women washing their laundry in a lake, goats, chicken, dogs and cows roaming the streets.
I posted a selection of the photos I shot in Whitefield here; it is a combination of pics taken with a Holga and the iphone.

The 200 Mark (The #365 Project)

2010-05-25T23:30:00.009+02:00

As you may know, I embarked on Seasons of Glass, a project a little while ago to shoot and post a picture a day for year. That project has now reached its 200 mark, and I figured 200 would be a good number to write up a first summary.

I should start out that while overall I'm very happy with the results I achieved so far, and with the quality of the photos I managed to take, there were days when I felt like canceling the project - where I thought that the project, in the end, was more about quantity than quality. Fortunately, 'though, these days were rather rare. Overall, pulling the project through has kept me on my toes. It made me look for possible subjects everywhere and at every hour, challenged me to find things I normally would not have photographed and also made me take detours and discover new areas and aspects of Berlin. Overall, the project is a mixture of several things: a documentary of sorts about the places I see (and thus, to a large degree, it is about Berlin) as well as the things that I do. It is also an exploration of taking photos with the iPhone and the possibilities of editing these, or even using them to create collages, multiple exposures and drawings. In the end, 'though, the driving force has always been to find one picture that not only was worth being put up and shown to the public, but one that was maybe better than all the ones before (sometimes that also meant putting up not one picture but a small set of images).

Looking at the tags that have now assembled over 200 days, it is not surprising that Berlin is up there at the top of the list; and following it the two topics which have been the focus of my photography for the past ten years: urban and people. Seeing how long the winter was this year, it's also not surprising to see that tag way up at the top. Another tag, Little Things, is a bit more surprising: it's the expression I use to denote photos of small objects (statues, flowers, anything) I find around the flat, the hotel rooms, on the sidewalk. The kind of things I normally would not have bothered to shoot. Other tags, like toonpaint, doubleX and collage, reflect some of the techniques I apply using various iPhone apps.

The rest of the tags pretty much gives a nice summary of what my life was like the last 200 days: two trips to India, the daily grind of taking subways and trains, life in Neukoelln...

There are 165 more days to come: summer is waiting in the aisles and hopefully a couple more trips are coming up before the end of the Seasons of Glass. I hope to have fun with the remaining shoots, and I hope you'll enjoy it as well.

Bye Bye Winter

2010-04-03T18:05:00.000+02:00

Spring is here, sort of. In honour of that new season, here is a look back at the long long winter we've had: Berlin Under Snow, a new set which I created on the Urban page. The photos were taken with a Holga and with the iPhone. Enjoy.

New India Galleries Online

2010-02-28T11:41:00.002+01:00

I finally finished scanning in all the negatives from the Holga and Diana+ rolls I took in Chennai, Mamallapuram and Bangalore back in January, and I posted two new galleries to the Holga page. Unfortunately several of the rolls had severe light leaks and a good many pics were wasted. You see some of the not quite so damaged pics in the galleries.

Over in the People section, I added a new India page. It also contains the iPhone photos I took, as well as the images from last year's trip.

Update 20Mar2010: Having returned from yet another trip to Bangalore, I added a series of iPhone pics to the Bangalore 2010 set on Incidental Images.

Analogue Daydreams - The art of Holga photography

2010-02-12T20:00:00.004+01:00

Back in January, Jim Elson, a media student in Berlin, interviewed myself and another Berlin based Holga photographer, Mathias Meyer, for a video about the use of and the fascination with Holga cameras, or, as Jim put it, "A short film about the Holga film camera, and those who love it". To the interview he added footage of us taking pictures with the camera and mixed in the photos taken during those sessions.
The video is an interesting essay about what Holga photography is all about. Check it out here.

India Revisited

2010-01-30T13:35:00.001+01:00

In January I returned to India for a little more than two weeks, some six months after my last visit. This trip took me to Chennai and also back to Bangalore. After the very mixed impressions I took home with me from Bangalore last time, Chennai turned out to be a very positive surprise. The city is the fourth largest in India, but it feels a lot less crowded than Bangalore. Traffic has its hiccups, but it's nowhere near as congested. There are other differences: I saw less extreme poverty and less destruction of old buildings to make way for shiny new glass palaces. There are still all the negative points which one has come to associate with India, the most noticeable of which is the extreme pollution: garbage and dirt that is just everywhere, accompanied by an all pervading stench; something which, I think, not only speaks of an utter disrespect of nature, but chiefly of other people's living space.

Still, I can truly say that I enjoyed my time in Chennai. As always, much of the joy of being in a foreign place is tied to the people you meet, and I found again that the hospitality and friendliness of the people in India is outstanding. Some of the best time I had was spending time at the beach in the evening during the week-end of Pongal (a South Indian harvest festival celebrated in mid-January), surrounded by thousands of people came out there en masse to enjoy themselves. In India, the residents of Tamil Naidu are renowned to be more religious and spiritual than elsewhere, and one of Chennai's striking characteristics is the large amount of temples and shrines encountered everywhere. Typical are also the large amount people wearing traces of Vibhuti, the sacred ash used in religious worship in Hinduism, on their brows. I don't know if it is their spirituality, or the climate (which can be extremely hot, I heard, but was a pleasant 30 degrees when I was there), or just the general laissez-faire attitude which I've come to associate with the residents of most seaside cities, but there was something of a very pleasantly laid-back feeling to the place.

I took several rolls of films in and around Chennai, all of which are away to be developed. Meantime, however, here is a link to two galleries of photos I took on the iPhone: one of Chennai (which includes some video footage), and one of Bangalore. Enjoy.

PS: more photos of Chennai and also of Bangalore can be found at my daily photoblog, Seasons of Glass.

"Be Berlin" Exhibition to be repeated in Berlin City Hall

2010-01-26T06:42:00.005+01:00

In June of last year, the Luxembourg Embassy in Berlin held an exhibition of Berlin themed photographs by Luxembourg photographers, in which I also participated with a series of Holga photos taken at Berlin's CSD parades. This exhibition is to be repeated for one night only at the Berlin City Hall ("Rotes Rathaus") on Saturday, 30 January, for the "Long Night of the Museums."

The other four photographers are Marc Glesener, Ann Michaux, Marc Theis und Arthur Thill.

More information can be found at the Luxembourg Embassy's website.

2009 Reviewed

2009-12-31T17:57:00.002+01:00

It's that time of year to create best-of lists - and here are my personal highlights from 2009.

We started January in London, which certainly was a good choice for passing New Year's Eve. Wintertime in London is also the perfect setting for creating very moody black and white photographs.

The next few months very comparatively boring, but May saw us travel to Amsterdam. Enjoyed the city hugely.

There was one major highlight in June: the Be Berlin photo exhibition in the Luxembourg Embassy in which I participated with a set of photos taken at various Gay Pride events. Fittingly, June is when the CSD marches are held, and this year I also captured a nice set of pics from the event.

For my birthday I received a Holga 120WPC camera, that is, a wide-angle pinhole camera. In July I went out and shot the first rolls of films with it. I must say, I do love that camera.

In August I went to India, to Bangalore to be precise. It spent most of the time working, but managed to get away to Mysore for a day. This old city was the highlight of that altogether very short - and strange - trip.

September I spent more time experimenting with the Holga 120WPC. Also, we visited the old East German broadcasting center, where I shot this set of photos.

In Octobre we took advantage of the last beautiful days to spend some time on the Baltic sea, on the island of Ruegen. The Diana+ camera was just perfect to catch the moody atmosphere of that time and place.

In November, I got myself an iPhone, and soon started playing around with the camera and the photography apps that exist out there. Taking photos on a daily basis, I soon ended up with a rather nice set of pics.

In December I took a short trip to Beijing. Didn't come back with many photos, but thanks to the iPhone, with a couple of good ones.

And to end the year in review, here is a photo taken today, on the very last day of the year; the year when Berlin finally saw some decent snow again.

So this leaves me then wishing you all a Happy New Year, be good, be creative, and whatever you are, don't be boring.

Around Berlin 2009

2009-12-28T12:08:00.005+01:00

I've uploaded a series of pictures taken throughout Berlin in the course of 2009; ranging from the few cold snowy days in January to the first snow in December. The colour photographs were taken using the Holga 120N and 120WPC cameras, and the black and white ones with the Diana+ camera.

The gallery can be accessed from the toy camera page by following the "Berlin Around Town 2009" link.

Berlin by iPhone

2009-12-12T11:01:00.004+01:00

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

2009-11-24T21:02:00.003+01:00

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

2009-10-23T19:07:00.004+02:00

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

2009-10-05T11:28:00.005+02:00

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

2009-09-22T09:37:00.003+02:00

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

2009-09-15T21:48:00.002+02:00

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

2009-09-12T12:38:00.004+02:00

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.

India Seen Through Tinted Glass

2009-08-23T20:16:00.008+02:00

I've just returned from a ten day trip to India. Sounds exciting? So it was. It was also rather unreal.

The trip was for business - and as such, more work than play. That wasn't the bad part, 'though (I've been on worse, hopping in and out of cities in the blink of an eye).

What made this trip so unreal is the fact that it was one of the most sheltered I've ever been on. I spent most of my time in air conditioned rooms or in air conditioned cars, being whisked through a dusty, noisy city teeming with life; reduced to a spectator observing the real life through the tinted glass of office, hotel or car windows.

So, if someone asks me, how was India, I have a hard time answering. India was out there - I wasn't.

My time in India - the real India - was reduced to two days - a Saturday and a Sunday. One day to explore Bangalore, the other to see old, historic Mysore with its palaces and temples. Two days wasn't time enough to get a grasp of the place - to come to terms with the newness or to see patterns. So all I glimpsed was chaos. A chaos that works somehow, I'm sure, but I didn't have time to find out how. I got but a sense of the colours (a good many of them, and the most cheerful aspect of India, I found), smells (again, a good many, many of them pleasant) and noise (most of which reduced to the constant honking of cars - not the most pleasant, but I did have time enough to get used to that). And people, of course; again, a good many, and again, mostly pleasant.

I've come back with but four rolls of films. I haven't had them developed yet, so I do not yet know how they turned out. I know that some will be terribly boring. I always take time to warm up to a new place - going first for shooting the obvious sights (in this case, above mentioned palaces and temples). I eventually turned to photographing people, something I enjoy doing, but I need to know first that it is ok with the people. When people stopped us to take photographs of us (even handing us their toddlers to pose with them), it was pretty obvious that being photographed was pretty much ok.

What I haven't photographed is the misery that is seemingly inherent in Indian life - the beggars, or the people living in hovels beside the shiny glass palaces. I've never felt comfortable with this sort of photography - it work for others, but I do not see myself as a photojournalist. I do like shooting the everyday situations, 'though, and I do hope I managed to capture some of this in the few pictures I took.

Meanwhile, while waiting for the Holga and Diana+ to be developed and scanned (which may be a while yet), here are a couple of pedestrian pics taken with the cell phone.

CSD 2009

2009-07-11T20:08:00.006+02:00

The photographs from this year's Christopher Street Day, a.k.a. Gay Pride, are up now and available from the toycamera page. They are all black & white and shot with the Diana+ camera.

Holga Wide Angle Pinhole

2009-07-11T08:50:00.006+02:00

A new camera joined my collection of "low fi" equipment, this time around a Holga 120WPC, which is a wide angle pinhole camera (i.e. it's got no lens). I took it out for a spin to Berlin's main station, and the first pics turned out really well. I used the 6x8 format, next time around I'll be trying the 6x12 format, and colour.

I've posted a selection of the pics on flickr. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Addendum: here is a very good review of the Holga 120WPC at Holgablog.

Photos I like (a lot):

2009-07-04T11:55:00.005+02:00

. . .

... by Navid Pax, over at flickr.

"Be Berlin" Review

2009-07-04T11:37:00.003+02:00

The "Be Berlin" exhibition in the Luxembourg Embassy is now closed, but there are indications that the exhibition may be on at the Berlin City Hall ("Rotes Rathaus") in the fall.

Meanwhile, here is a link to a review of the exhibition published in a Luxembourg newspaper. The article is in German.

"Be Berlin" Exhibition at Luxembourg Embassy

2009-06-13T09:49:00.004+02:00

The Luxembourg embassy in Berlin is organising an exhibition of Berlin photographs by Luxembourg photographers. I have been asked to contribute some pictures, and picked images from the yearly Christopher Street Day as a theme.

Other photographers are: Marc Glesener, Anne Michaux, Marc Theis und Arthur Thill.

The exhibition runs from 24 June to 14 July. The address is:

Luxembourg Embassy / Maison du Grand Duché de Luxembourg

Klingelhöferstraße 7

10785 Berlin (Schöneberg)

More information (in German) here.

Urban Beijing

2009-05-10T10:03:00.002+02:00

I put together a new gallery in the Urban section, comprised of a series of urban photographs taken in Beijing over three trips in 2007 and 2008. The first two trips took place before the Olympic games, the last one after.

For more photos on Beijing, see also the toycamera section.

Remember Last Summer?

2009-02-08T11:58:00.002+01:00

I guess a grey winter day is the best of time to sort out summer pictures, and thus I've uploaded a series of people photographs taken in July in Barcelona and neighbouring Sitges. The gallery is available from the Portrait page.

London under a Pale Winter Sun

2009-01-25T13:42:00.003+01:00

Having spent New Year's in London this time around, I came back with a bunch of photos taken with the Diana+ using the new 110mm tele-objective, and with the Holga camera on those rare days where the sun was out. The result is a collection of sometimes rather gloomy photos which at times seem to stem from a different age.

One of the rolls didn't roll up properly in the camera and a series of images came out with light leaks; another one ended up scratched. I still decided to put some of those damaged ones up.

To view the pictures, proceed to the Holga page, the links are directly below the image.

Dresden in Winter

2008-12-25T12:55:00.002+01:00

Dresden in winter can be a very gloomy place, and I've got the pictures to prove it. ;) Just uploaded a series of photos taken in Dresden on the last November week-end, using the Diana+ camera with a 110mm lens, which accounts for some of the gloominess.

The gallery is available from the Toy Camera page.

New Gallery: Autumn Passes (First Snow)

2008-12-24T12:40:00.004+01:00

I've uploaded a series of photographs taken between October and December of 2008, from the last of the golden autumn days to the first snow for this year. The camera I used was the Diana+; for the colour photos I used a 38mm objective, for the black&white ones a 110mm objective. The latter gives the photos, taken mostly in the early morning, a very gloomy look indeed.

The link to the gallery is available both from the Toy Camera page and the Berlin page. Enjoy.

New News Blog

2008-12-24T10:09:00.005+01:00

I decided to switch from yahoo's permanent beta status blog to blogger to post news on Always Arriving and other more or less noteworthy items.

The old blog is still available under this [link] if you want to check out what was new in the past.

More news to follow soon....