Photography

Photography is the science, art, application and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.

When I was a wee boy, I started out with black-and-white 35mm film and a post-war Kodak Retina I. We didn't need all those newfangled features like autofocus or light-metering back then, we just used our eyes. And the Ansel Adams Zone System, of course.

In the attic we had a makeshift darkroom for printing black-and-white film. I still believe this is the best way to learn the craft, because it teaches frugality. Film and paper were expensive, and post-processing was cumbersome, which was a real motivation to frame the scene in-camera and wait for the perfect light, or be fast enough to catch the moment.

With the advent of color photography, my hobby died, the equipment was too expensive and complicated to do-it-yourself, and the photo-service would always turn my best efforts into a pig's breakfast: with brown snow and pink skies. As it turned out, I just had to wait a few decades for technology to catch up with my particular requirements.

Around 2008, digital cameras finally came within reach with respect to quality and price. I owned digital cameras before that, but come on, green and pink mountains, really? JPEG-processing was very, and I mean very, aggressive and “lossy”, and would always lose the subject of my photos. In 2008, I bought a Nikon D300, the first Intel Mac Pro and Aperture 2.0, and rekindled my hobby.

On the following pages you will find galleries of my best photos ordered by year. The galleries were built using the PhotoSwipe JavaScript plug-in. The full-size images are rather large: 2560px and on average just shy of a megabyte. So if you are on a data budget, be careful. When browsing the gallery, three full-size images are always loaded and buffered to speed up navigation.

Enjoy!