Wide-Angle Urban Poetry, Vol. 2: London & Brighton

For the second year running I spent New Year's in Brighton, and same as last year I followed that vacation up with a stay in London. And same as last year, I brought back a number of photographs.

Last year I had taken the analog Lomo Belair panoramic camera with me. This year I decided to go digital and took the Fujifilm X30. I took it primarily because I was expecting bad weather and low light, which normally hampers the use of lo-fi analog cameras. However, luckily bad weather wasn't the norm, so that I ended up with a number of splendid colour photographs as well as black and white ones.

I'm particularly happy with many of the photos which I brought back from

London, especially the ones which I shot in and around the Barbican. I visited the Barbican Centre to see an exhibition, Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age; a show which I thought quite brilliant, both for the theme and for the large number of exceptional photos on display. At the same time, the Barbican complex is in itself a highly photogenic urban jungle, bordering on the ever growing architectural frenzy (some would say mess) that is London's East End. Certainly it was no coincidence that the Barbican was putting on a show with this kind of theme, and so it was not necessarily a coincidence either that I ended up with a number of shots reflecting the theme of the show. 

The photographs which I took this year with the Fujifilm X30 in many ways compliment the panoramic pictures which I took last year with the Belair camera, so I combined the two in a common set, adding also a number of Polaroids which fit the theme of urban panoramas, as well as a couple of 'Holgaramas' from 2008, and a collage which I did in 2004 of Saint Paul's as seen from the Tate Modern. Altogether they also illustrate how fast London's skyline keeps changing, for better and for worse. Additionally, the photos illustrate another facet of London which I always found fascinating: here, the various epochs of London's long history do not so much co-exist side by side, but seem to pile up on top of each other. The picture above is a good example as it shows tiers of buildings from various centuries, combining the medieval church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate with buildings from the 19th, 20th and 21st century high rises into a very crowded skyline.

Links:

- Wide-Angle Urban Poetry: London Panoramas

- Wide-Angle Urban Poetry: Berlin (blog entry)

- Brighton in Winter

- More UK photographs

- Review of the Constructing World exhibition in Time Out London

Wide Angle Bucharest and London

I recently uploaded a series of photos from London and Bucharest (Romania), all of them taken with the Lomography Belair x 6-12 camera and using a 58mm lens. Contrary to the Berlin set posted earlier, I used the camera primarily to shoot buildings and vistas rather than the more intimate street scenes I captured in Berlin (see my earlier blog post here).

Here is the link: Wide Urban Angles

More of my Belair photos can be found [here].

Brighton and London by Holga

It took me a while, but now they are finally up, the photos I took with my Holga in London and Brighton back in May. The reason why it took me so long, apart from some issues with my aging scanner, was that I also re-arranged the set-up of the Holga page, and decided to try out a new version of the software I'm using to create the web pages (in case you're interested, I'm using Rapidweaver to create the web site, in combination with the Photographos and Photographos IV themes). The new version of Photographos offers some nice new features, such as a console to hide text and thumbnails and a good-looking mobile version of the pages, but it took me awhile to get the layout right. To cut a long story short, the new pages in the new layout are up since yesterday, and I hope you enjoy them.

A note on the films I used: I was trying out the new 120 films by Lomography. As you can see, the colours look great (better than Kodak, not quite as good as Fuji), but you also notice some light leaks on a few shots. Actually, on of the rolls unrolled in my hands as I unwrapped it - at least half the shots were waisted. Not so good... The black and white shots are from the trusted Ilford films - you can't go wrong there, still my favourite b&w films.

Here are the links then:

• Brighton and environs (Lewes and Rottingdean)
• London
• Holga page

Polaroids from London and Brighton

I uploaded a selection of the polaroids I shot while visiting London and Brighton a couple of weeks ago. I alternated between colour and black & white films, using predominantly the black-frame 600 UV+ film, which has become my favourite black & white film. The weather alternated between sunny and stormy and rainy, so that I ended up with pics of blue skies as well as stormy seas.... 
– Brighton Polaroids
– London Polaroids

New Polaroid Portraits

I brought back new portrait photographs taken with Polaroid cameras from a recent trip to the UK, as well as some new ones from Berlin, and posted them in the revised People in Polaroids set.
[Click here to view]

London under a Pale Winter Sun

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.

[Click here to view]