Hangang
A short set of images taken walking along the banks of the Hangang river in Seoul. This was a particularly rainy and wet time and there were few people around, often giving the illusion of an abandoned city – an illusion that is easily broken if you are just a little higher and can see all the traffic! I am still finding my feet at the moment and I will write more on Seoul and Korea when I have had enough time to understand the region better than I do […]
Urban
A short photo-essay using urban fragments, shot in and around the Barcelona that the tourist brochures do not seem to show.
Fragments
Five fragmentary images taken in Barcelona.
December
A short set of images taken in December. This has been a challenging month for photography as a lot of time has been spent migrating tsoniq.com to hugo and complete a set of synthesiser plugins that have been waiting a long time for release. These were taken on a series of walks around Barcelona, exploring the railway around Sants and Bellvitge, as well as the city centre. There were surprisingly few festive lights this year, but there is always something interesting to find at night. All images taken with the […]
El Prat
A set of images from a walk from El Prat to Castelldefels, at the very edge of the Barcelona metropolitan area. I much prefer the beaches in winter, when the temperature is more bearable and there are fewer people. The walk is about 20km, with quite a lot on sand, necessitating an early start from the El Prat railway station. From there, there is a short walk through the town to start of the wet lands and dunes that surround the airport, which dominates everything not least for the constant […]
October
It has been a difficult October, as most of the month has been spent in Italy with multiple trips to deal with family health problems – fortunately all now resolved successfully. This has meant that photography has been very constrained, both in time and also by the ability to carry camera gear on easyJet, so these are a somewhat random set taken with walks around the area of Sesto San Giovanni in Milan and also on a brief excursion to Como. All images taken with the GFX100s and GF45, GF55 […]
Camí de Ronda
A short post with some images from a gentle hike along part of the Camí de Ronda from Tossa de Mar and back through the inland forest track. Tossa de Mar was once a small fishing village, but of course now like pretty much everywhere on the Costa Brava it has become intensely focussed on mass tourism. Fortunately, this was late day in September and despite the amazingly clear skies and 30c temperatures there were remarkably few people. This was a walking trip so we did not stop in the […]
Eight
A set of eight images from the eighth month of the year, shot while on vacation in northern Italy. As always, fragments of life seem to make the most interesting images. As usual, there are always the shrines: And bizarrely, I found a number of different houses with Disney characters outside. I am not sure why Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is so popular with mountain communities. I also tried some artsy fragments of scenes, with mixed success. There should probably be a lifetime quota for shots of aging […]
Don’t go Chasing
Don’t go Chasing A set of images taken on a weekend hiking trip to Bielsa, in the Parque Nacional de Ordesa. The park is part of the Pirineos, with typical glacial features. We were extremely lucky to have arrived to good weather following a week of heavy rain and storms, so that the rivers were very active for this time of year. We had time for three hikes. The first around los Lllanos de Larri, the area to the west of Monte Perdido and Revilla. The area is quite busy […]
Bootstraps
It has been almost two years since the last post. COVID took a pretty heavy toll on going out to take street photographs, and it has been difficult to summon up enthusiasm to post new content. This post is an attempt to bootstrap the blog-writing process again. The intervening time has seen many changes. Aside from the pandemic, there is the continuing fall out from Brexit with its catastrophic economic, social and political effects, the war in Ukraine which impacts and threatens everyone, and the continuous unfolding disaster that is […]
Catholic Shrines of the Northern Italian Alps
A selection of images of Catholic Shrines in the northern alpine region of Italy, around Lago di Como. These are found on mountain paths and trails and in many cases are still actively maintained through a mixture of tradition, conservation, and ongoing superstition.
Five Landscapes
Five monochrome landscape images, taken in the Italian alps. These were shot using a Leica Q2 Monochrom and various colour-contrast and polarising filters. The Q2M is a monochrome-only compact camera with a fixed 28mm lens which was bought to replace an ageing Ricoh GR for travel where carrying film is no longer practical. The Q2M has the advantage of a built-in EVF, and shooting with the monochrome sensor is essentially the same process as for shooting with black and white film, only without the chemicals. Compositionally, I found the Q2M […]
Sofia
The first post for 2021, with some images taken on a recent work trip to Bulgaria. Street and social-documentary photography has been badly curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here in Barcelona there are heavy restrictions on all forms of movement, with both a curfew and limitations how far it is possible to move. Added to this is the expectation of social distancing, which makes conventional street photography with a wide-angle lens and close proximity with people problematic. Street photography is invariably something that feels risky, but with a highly contagious […]
35mm
Spain’s massive COVID spike not withstanding, it is now at least possible, if not necessarily advisable, to go out and photograph on the streets again. These are some of the images from the initial attempts to resume the Barcelona Dark project. In fact, getting back to photographing at night again is proving somewhat challenging. Having moved home more or less during the worst of the pandemic earlier this year, the surrounding area is different and needs a different approach to photography. I also feel like I have lost a lot […]
C330
A set of test images shot on a Mamiya C330 TLR with HP5+ film. These are from a few rolls taken to test out the camera and 80mm lens, in anticipation of a longer term project, for which I wanted a higher resolution camera that could conceivably be used without a tripod and which was not prohibitively expensive. The C-series TLRs with leaf shutter lenses and lack of a flappy mirror are a good candidate for this, and more versatile than TLRs such as the Rolleiflex thanks to the ability […]
Dark
A set of test images shot at night in Italy, to gauge whether or not a digital camera would be a reasonable replacement for film in the Barcelona Dark series. The bottom line is probably not. It is very hard to emulate the “glow” around lights that get with film (caused by back-scattering of light from the film base). Shooting with a diffusion filter gets someway towards the look of film, but the fall-off with distance from the light is never quite right – although it is a nice effect […]
Transient Eye 