Equipment

Port Vell and the Leica M7

Port Vell
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Early morning shot looking towards fishing harbour taken from alongside the Maremagnum at Port Vell, Barcelona. This is one of the first pictures taken with a newly acquired Leica M7 and 35mm Zeiss Vogon Biogon lens. To ensure even less continuity, this was also the first time that I have used Kodak Ektar 100 colour negative film. Shooting with a rangefinder camera is very much a different experience to a film SLR. The rangefinder itself is very easy to use and much faster to focus accurately than the usual SLR split-screen.Using the viewfinder with […]

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Photography

Analogue Lessons

That 70's vibe
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I am gradually catching up with processing  the recent film shots and scanning the results. Rather than posting the better images I thought that it might be fun to first post some of the disasters and try to understand what when wrong. All the images here were taken with the Minolta XD-s using Fuji C200 colour film. The first image (above) has a seriously 70’s vibe to it thanks to an incredible amount of unintended noise – the result of a seriously underexposed image. When shooting with a modern digital camera you […]

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Journalism

La Diada

La Diada and the Via Catalana
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The 11th of September is the National Day of Catalunya – or more commonly just “La Diada”. Precisely three hundred years ago Catalunya lost the Siege of Barcelona ending the Spanish war of Succession and effectively establishing the basis of what has become modern Spain. And so perhaps unsurprisingly this regional day of holiday has become a focus for the Catalan independence movement. This year, the movement has become more powerful than ever as the region prepares for a vote on independence from Spain on the 9th of November. As the slogans and […]

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Photography

The Old Dairy

Milk churn and racks of maturing cheeses, Pian delle Betulle, Italy
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  The walk from Pian delle Betulle, in Alta Valsassina, to the Larice Bruciato (burnt larch)  is a lovely trail through a beech forest and pasturelands. On the way there is the Alpe Ortighera, a summer pasture, where there is the old dairy illustrated in this post. This is the main room at the entrance of the dairy with the churning machine to make butter (the stainless steel drum on the right) and some of the season production of ricotta, a whey cheese. The forms on the shelves are left to […]

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Photography

Fragments and Scenes

Church Fresco, Pasturo, Italy.
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Random fragmentary memories from the North of Italy. I quite like using small contextless fragmentary images as opposed to something with more context and depth. The image becomes more about the texture and pattern than the content. I like that the fragments are completely detached – but even more contextualised images (such as the ones below) can be sufficiently alien to take on a similar character if the view is not familiar with the area being photographed and the subjects are not well known: All images were taken with the […]

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Photography

Valsassina Panoramas

Valsassina Storm Clouds, Italy
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  Three images of Valsassina, looking up towards the head of the valley from the side of Monte Giumello, Italy. These are stitched panoramas using a 50mm lens with a polariser. By careful rotation of the polariser it is possible to bring out a lot of detail in the storm clouds, and also significantly change the apparent colour of the sky. Sadly, this did not allow us to change the weather…  

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Nature

Five Textures

Old weathered log
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Again, something slightly different from usual with some abstract(ish) natural textures photographed while walking in the Alps. With one exception these were again shot using a polarising filter – which lived on the camera most of the time as a way to cut out haze and reflections on this rather damp trip.

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Photography

Green

Woodland path, Sanico, Italy
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A slightly different post from normal, with some images of greenery from what was the wettest August I have ever seen in the Alps. When not being deluged with water we were usually embedded in the low clouds, making any walking and photography interesting in the best proverbial sense. One thing that really stood out visually was the presence of the colour green. The plants were clearly enjoying the weather better than the humans (and cats) and the foliage produced some very vivid colour while wet. These photographs are not […]

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Photography

Si Parla Italiano

Barcelona Souvenirs
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Having both been away and the back again in Barcelona, we are now going away again – this time to Italy to escape the August heat. I will update the blog with new posts when I can while away, but I suspect that the internet connection is going to be a bit sporadic for the next few weeks….

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Photography

Raindrops keep falling…

Unseasonal Rain, Career de Joaquin Costa, Barcelona. Canon 5D Mark III with 50mm f1.2L.
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  This has been one of the wetter spring/summers in Barcelona – alternating the extreme mediterranean heat with sudden and often fierce thunderstorms. The resulting humidity makes it feel even hotter than it should do at this time of year. Carrer de Joaquin Costa, Barcelona. Canon 50mm @ f1.2 prefocussed on the ground at the point where the subject was walking to.

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Photography

Sofia

Sofia Bulgaria Street Photography
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A short selection of images taken while in Sofia (Bulgaria) for work last week. These were all taken with the Ricoh GR and processed in Lightroom using the high-contrast red filter preset plus some tweaks to the exposure. I had hoped to get more shots, but this was a working week that was also somewhat hampered by heavy thunderstorms. I also have some shots with the Minolta XD-s, but it will more more than a month before I can have these processed and scanned. I do not have anywhere near enough […]

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