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about
photography
I used to make some impromptu images at opening
night parties in the
theatre, and preferred black & white pics. This
changed abruptly
when I went to India. It is simply impossible to
catch the atmosphere of tropical countries without
the colour. It seems
that under the blistering sun, only bright colours
survive. You'll
never see such a richness of hues and intensity as
in the tropics. With
each voyage, I brought home more films...
The first camera I used was a semi-automatic Minolta
reflex. The
oldest travel photos made with this camera are from
Morocco around
1975. The negatives are lost, so all I have are
slightly discoloured
prints and pepped up scans of these. To India, in
1994, I brought a
compact
Nikon, with a difficult ocular and the annoying
habit of switching
inadvertently to the panoramic option that wastes
two exposures for one
shot. This Nikon didn't like all the humidity that
comes with the
monsoon. On the next big trip, this time to Vietnam
in 1997, humidity
made parts of the film stick together inside the
camera. The plastic
mechanics of the film transport weren't up to the
task of ungluing the
film and lost some of their teeth. A technical guy
with golden hands in
Hanoi succeeded in making the camera work again...
not for too long,
and I lost out on photo opportunities in the
Montagnard regions near Sa
Pa and Bac Ha in the
Northwest.
For the next trips to the Far East (1999 and onward)
I used my
favourite so
far, a Pentax reflex MZ50. It is a lightweight
camera with a 28-80 zoom
lens. Since I'm together with Touché, the automatic
option is used
quite frequently to make pictures with the both of
us. Unfortunately,
during one of these self-pictures, the camera fell
into a shallow
pit and got full of very fine sand. The guy at the
shop in Antwerp blew
some compressed air into the camera and said that
anything more to
salvage the machine would cost more than a new one.
The next June in
Salvador, Brazil, we found another technical guy
with golden hands who
put the camera back into a vanilla state for a small
price. He also had
the body of a
Nikon F601 reflex, but wasn't able to find us a
macro lens to go with
it. The search went on for some time, till my spouse
presented me with a Nikkor 55mm 1:2,8 lens that I
can use for smaller
objects, flowers and the
like.
As you can see, I wasn't in a hurry to swithc to
digital cameras, not even
to digital reflex cameras. For a long time, the
quality of digital photos did lag way behind that of
the 'old' analog ones. And most of all we
didn't like the superficial trial-and-error
throw away kind of work with a digital machine. On
our trip to Brazil in 2010, in particular for the
famous Pantanal wetland, we brought an old Sony
digital reflex camera. It had a Zeiss lense, but the
resolution still was quite poor, and I didn't like
what it did to the colours of the incredible nature
of the Pantanal. In 2011, I finally bought a
state-of-the art Nikon reflex D3100 with a Nikkor
18-105mm zoom. From our 5 week Italian tour, we
brought more than 5000 photos... a lot of pruning to
do there!!
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