Brighton by Instax

Sometime last year, I bought a Fujifilm Instax Mini camera, the Neo 90 Classic. Although the camera in itself comes with a number of seductive features (double exposure, timer...), the small, if not to say tiny, size of the photos made me look upon the camera as not much more than a gimmick. As such, I used it for taking snapshots and souvenirs. I did take it with me to Brighton earlier this year, however, and as I quite like some of the resulting shots, I decided to post them. 

Much like its big brother, the Instax Wide camera, it is very good at rendering colours and for shooting in low-light situations. The images are not quite as sharp though, which in some instances actually works towards their advantage. Anyway, it proves that a camera designed for the Instagram age, i.e. for capturing food, pets, selfies and party guests, has indeed a few surprises up its sleeve...

So, here it is, Brighton by Instax Mini. Enjoy...

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

Brighton by Belair

I spent this New Year's in Brighton in South England. I had just before gotten me a new camera, the Lomography Belair x 6-12 camera. It's a medium format camera, using 120 film. It comes with exchangeable lenses and settings that allows one to shoot either 6x6, 6x8 or 6x12 exposures. I did not have a chance to test the camera before leaving for Brighton, so the films I shot there were pretty much my test run. I decided to use the 58mm lens and either the 6x8 or 6x12 mm size settings to take full advantage of the camera's panorama abilities.

My experiences with the camera are mixed, and I will be posting a review later to explain. Suffice to say at this moment though is that overall I'm happy with the results, especially considering the less than perfect weather for most of my stay there. Some of the images are formatted not quite right as the shift between what you see in the visor and the result is quite considerable. Also a couple of rolls did not roll up properly, so there is some light leakage on the last exposures on those roll.

Having said all that, here then is a selection of the best Belair pics from a few moody, wintry days in Brighton: click here to view. 

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]