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I have lived two lives, as a writer and as a photographer. My life as a photographer began in Rotterdam at the age of eleven when I could afford an Agfa Clack, which was a glorified box camera producing 6 x 9 cm negatives. My pocket money allowed me to buy not more than one roll of 120 film once a month. Those rolls produced eight negatives, which meant that I had to be extremely careful in selecting my subjects. But this severe limit to the number of pictures I could take was, in retrospect, a good thing.
I got into the habit of doing a lot of photography in my mind without using the camera. Mental photography. Aside from envisaging compositions, one can imagine how to solve the great challenges of compromises between freezing movement and depth of field. A small lens opening meant great depth of field (sharpness from back to front) and long exposure. But the long exposure meant that you could not freeze movement. Figuring out what to choose with what long was a photographic dilemma is a habit that has stayed with me, even though it is today hardly relevant anymore. But in those early days, in which the machine gun approach to photography was unthinkable, my habits were not shaped by the thought, common today, that bursts from the shutter might produce a single good photograph.
My other life, a life of exploring and writing about social life and power began eight years later when I left the country of my birth, the Netherlands, to discover the world in a direct manner by hitchhiking through half of Asia and ending up in Japan where I was to spend almost half my life. With Tokyo as a base I eventually covered many events in much of East- and South Asia as a newspaper reporter, and finally came to rest writing books. But all that need not detain us here.
Japan is of course one of the great centers of photography, both with respect to having made high quality cameras affordable for non-professionals, as well as the many Japanese photographers filling a plethora of thick photo magazines with their work.
I was always thrilled by photographic detail, and after graduating to medium format cameras (a 6×6 twinlens Ikoflex in my teens, and a Hasselblad when I could afford one in my 20s) I realized that these could not deliver negatives that would ever fully satisfy me.
In Japan I discovered the 4 x 5 inch format. But as I was working in total darkness for developing the sheet film, and in dim light enlarging the negatives, I began to wonder why on earth I should spend all that time without light and other discomforts – like the smell of hypo – for such a puny negative. It was of course better than 35mm and medium format, but still.
That is why I switched to truly large-format. 8 x 10 inch, four times the size of what I had been working with until then.
Changing 8×10 inch sheetfilm when traveling was a bit of an ordeal. After a hot today in Death Valley, Canyonlands, or one of the other unsurpassed landscape-rich parts of the American West, I would for more than an hour be stuck in a darkened motel bathroom. It takes roughly half an hour to check whether, with towels blocking light from under the door, they are truly pitchdark. The reward of perhaps one or two great 8×10 negatives, where worth the energy and time.
But there came a point when this had become too much for me. Fortunately, the digital revolution in photography happened just about at that time, and soon I discovered that as the software for working with images produced by image sensors improved at relatively great speed, it became possible to achieve even much bigger prints than from a 8×10 negative through stitching together a lot of images covering parts of the subject.
I began doing this with landscapes, temples, and anything else which did not contain much movement, for angles of view no one had seen before. This multiple exposure system could be combined with focus stacking to achieve sharpness all the way from a few feet in front of you to infinity. That compensated neatly for the tilted lens holder of the large-format technical camera.
For the macro flower compositions I went back to sturdy tripod, various bellows arrangements, plus a mini studio arrangement. The ACTUS, made by the Dutch large-format company Cambo, opened up and a new world of photographic possibilities. It replaced sheetfilm with the mirrorless camera as a digital censor for the usual technical camera treatment, with very fine focus and shifting and tilting of the front standard. These images required sharper large-format lenses than I had used with my 4 x 5 rigs. Another discovery was that the best enlarger lenses gave the best results. For these compositions that need to be sharp in every detail focus stacking is obviously essential.