Potsdam – Old Market

Not even an hour away from Berlin, Potsdam is a city that feels very different from Berlin. It’s always fun to play the tourist in a place so close to home.

All photos taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone. Hipstamatic is still my favourite camera app, and actually by now the only one I use. 

City Polaroids: Berlin, Part 2

 In September I published several sets of polaroid photos which I had taken over the summer, mostly in Berlin but also in Budapest and the South of France. As summer turned to autumn, I kept shooting polaroids, fretting a bit that the results may end up being inferior once less-than-perfect daylight conditions set in. As it turned out, both the cameras and the films continued to perform really well, and I ended up with another satisfying selection of pictures.

I published one set earlier, featuring mostly the autumnal colours that nature puts on display at that time of year. This week-end I uploaded another set in the “City Polaroids” series. These images were all taken between October and November in Berlin. As in the earlier sets, I mixed details i.e. fragments of urban life with shots of buildings (see also my comments in the related blog entry here). 

Now, compared to the sets published this summer, there are two major differences. One, of course, is the changing season: the bright colours of summer giving way gradually to the muted shades, or even non-colours, of autumn. At the same time, Impossible Project, the makers of the polaroid films, came out with a new formula, the Color Protection film. This new film stock manages to render colours a lot more life-like than the previous iterations. At first I used the PX 70 film (as I shoot mostly with SX-70 cameras), but then began using the PX 680 film together with an ND filter, and this is the solution that I eventually stuck with. The PX 680 film’s results are a shade darker than the PX 70, and the colours a bit more on the cold side. Also, they are more saturated and there were fewer irregularities. So if I were to recommend one film, it would be this PX 680 Color Protection.

Enough said, here are the links:

• City Polaroids: Berlin (2) – Autumn Colours
• City Polaroids: Berlin (1) – Summer Colours
• Polaroid page

Autumn Polaroids

“Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence”

Yoko Ono – Seasons of Glass

Now that the weather is turning (for the worse), and the last of the leaves are dropping from the trees, it’s time to kiss autumn good-bye. Time also to put together the photos from this year’s autumn photo outings, which, predictably, I did using Polaroid cameras this time around. So here it is then, a brand new collection of polaroids taken around parks and cemeteries in Berlin: Autumn Polaroids.

I used a variety of Impossible Project films when taking the pictures, which explains the different colour shades that can be noticed when browsing through the set: the new PX 70 Color Protection, which provides the more natural looking, warmer colours; the PX 680 Color Protection with also natural looking but less saturated colors, and the older PX 70 Color Shade Cool film with its trademark slight yellow tinge.


More links:

• Polaroid micro site
• Polaroid Summer

The Baltic Sea in Autumn….

When earlier this year I migrated my site to a new look and feel, I left out a few of the older sets. For some reason I left out a collection of photos which I shot on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen about three years ago, and today I remedied that, so here I proudly present one of the few nature sets I ever shot, and will probably ever shoot [click here to view].

As you can probably tell by browsing through this blog, my work is almost all urban related, whether I capture people or buildings. That does not mean that I don’t enjoy nature, ’cause I do, it’s just that nature doesn’t inspire me as much as a city does. Actually, one of the perks for me of being out of city is that I feel it quite relaxing to be in an environment where I don’t feel the constant urge to push a trigger. But since for every rule there’s got be some exceptions, this particular set is one. 

The photos were taken over an extended, partly sunny, partly stormy week-end on the island of Rügen, off Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. I used the Diana+, a camera I haven’t really used in a few years. The Diana+ was always my bad weather camera since it uses a shutter speed of 1/60, and I used it regularly during autumn and winter, but have sadly neglected it over the last years. Looking at these photos, I think that is a bit of a shame – the Diana magic comes out nicely in these pics. Well, it’s never too late, because, as they say, winter will come….