Autumn in Yamanashi
A less known aspect of the Japanese landscape is that in the autumn season it shows the greatest variety and shades of colour in its mountainous areas.
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Fuji in November red
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On a Serawak Island I
Bako National Park in the Sarawak part of Malaysia is actually at the end of a peninsula not far from Kuching. For me it is an island, because I got there after a sometimes wild boat ride in winter. The shoreline was the most scenically rewarding.
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On a Serawak Island II
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Bristlecone
Bristlecone Pines are the oldest living things on earth. Some go back 5000 years. The most famous concentration can be found in California’s Inyo National Forest, where these images were made some 40 years after I first visited there – see the analogue 8×10 collection.
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5000 Year Old
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Once I began developing 4×5 inch sheetfilm, which of course has to be done in darkness, without any tolerance for the slightest shimmer of light, with everything in the darkroom supposedly at your fingertips, and later when enlarging the negatives with just a bit of dim orange light, 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, 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.
Instead of a technical camera with full calibration of all parts, I decided on a mahogany Deardorff field camera, one of the greatest simple designs ever developed. Nothing on that camera was superfluous. It had no calibration of any sort; one had to do everything by touch. It had leather bellows which allowed for quite some extension. Under the well-known black cloth you would be manipulating the brass knobs to focus, and tilting the front standard to achieve sharpness according to the so-called Scheimphlug principle. Working with it, and seeing the upside-down image reaching overall sharpness and sublime composition gave me the feeling that I imagined someone playing a violin must have. I loved it and I miss it.
COMPOSITION WITH RUBBER TREES
Taken in Yunnan Province, South China.
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TEMPLE REMNANTS
Taken among the ruins of the ancient capital Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok.
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ON A ROAD NEAR MOAB
The lively town Moab in Utah is a base for visiting the extraordinary rock formations of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. But other roads in different directions provide stunning landscape scenes as well.
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COURT HOUSE TOWERS
This is a collection of tall stone columns located within the Park Avenue section of Arches National Park.
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But doing this kind of photography means carting a lot of weight around with you. The Deardorff was actually amazingly light, but all the lenses were heavy, and I was doing this before the lighter carbon tripods had appeared on the scene. Besides that you would have to carry at least one, but preferably two bags with film holders. These contain two sheets, but one normally exposed both of them for the same scene to make sure that what you had painstakingly set up would not later be spoiled by specks of dust or other mishaps.
When the digital revolution arrived we were provided with means to achieve large-format quality by stitching, of which I will say more in another part of this website. When medium format mirrorless digital cameras became available, an even more direct possibility for large-format photography had arrived. What I can now do with my Hasselblad x2d rivals the definition, the details and sharpness of my 8×10 negatives. Photography by analogue means retains a special quality, which is different from what the best digital cameras can produce, but not necessarily inferior.
LOTUS LAKE AT 11AM
These hundreds of thousands of flowers open in the early morning and close again at noon. The first time I reached this lake, after a 3 hour drive from Bangkok, I was half an hour late!
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THE THREE BROTHERS
The particular karst rock foundations that can be found in a string across China and down through the Thai Peninsula. These three are found in Khao Sok National Park, Thailand.
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Dutch Winter Morning
Shortly after sunrise, 20 mins from my home in the Dutch Polder.
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Fuji in November blue
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Kamakura November
The Great Buddha of Kamakura dates back to the 13th century.
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Veluwe Heather
A view of the heather in the central Hoge Veluwe national park in The Netherlands.
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