Sofia Session

Over the weekend, I was in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, to add another chapter to my European Capitals portfolio. At this point it is not yet clear whether Romania and Bulgaria will join the Union in 2007, but I want to be prepared in case. So, I arrived late Friday evening from London and jumped on the first plane to Munich on the Saturday morning. By noon I had arrived in warm and sunny Sofia.

It was a couple of months since I had worked with the Horizon camera. To be honest, I notice that I am growing a bit tired of this extremely panoramic perspective. Or maybe I was just physically and mentally exhausted from all the hard work over the past weeks and therefore unable to muster the alertness to be able to go up in the flow. Fact is that I'm much more focused on large format these days. That is what really stirs up my creative energies. I am really longing to go out with the Canham and experiment. My friend Hans Bol (www.hansbol.com) reports exactly the opposite. He has worked for years in (ultra) large format and is now rediscovering his Leica.

By the way, the Horizon has started to fall apart. After the rewind knob now also the release button has gone. I hope the camera will survive the last leg of the journey, to Bucharest. In Sofia, I also lost my Sekonic 508 exposure meter, a very good and costly instrument. Talk about being tired ...

Anyway, the negatives I brought with me from Sofia are ok. Not top class, but I have worse sections in my portfolio. I will certainly be able to select six interesting pictures from this chapter.

Finally, if you are ever travelling to Sofia, which I can recommend as it is a very lively and easy going city, and you are not sure how to go about and what to see, just contact Val (Valeria Lucanova) on skype (judoka1777). She will act as your trustworthy and knowledgeable guide, in Sofia and further afield in Bulgaria as well.

Hakendover happening

Hakendover is a little village, just outside the provincial town of Tienen in central Belgium. It used to be an important destination for pilgrims in medieval times. Every year on Easter Monday there is a religious procession involving more than a hundred horses: they move through the village to the top of a small hill overlooking the area. There the horses run three rounds after which they are blessed. This custom can probably be retraced to pre-Christian fertility rites. It still is a colourful happening, and of obvious interest to photographers.

Attracted by a beautiful Hakendover-portfolio built up over many years by my friend Willy Robbeets, I visited the event for the first time in 2005. This year there was a larger delegation of our photo club (Fotogroep Park-Heverlea). Our intention was to gather material for a black-and-white slide show.

I have never worked with black-and-white slide film. Agfa Scala used to be the reference in this area. Now, with the demise of Agfa, Scala has disappeared. But Rollei has quickly come up with an alternative. The Maco/Rollei 820 IR film, exposed at 100 asa, allows for positive development and results in very nice, slightly warm, contrasty, almost glowing chromes. This is what people tell about this film on the net:

"This film posses exceptional image quality, even better than SCALA. R-IR has an incredible dmax @ 3.8, producing the same stark ortho-type look of scala-film but better tonal range, sharpness and detail. R-IR has also an exceptional exposure latitude, 25iso-400iso. This film has also a true contrast control!" (see www.dr5.com).

The results are indeed impressive. And the good news is also that these chromes scan very, very easily. There is hardly any tweaking necessary to get a perfect, contrasty image on screen. The only thing I noticed is that I have to sharpen up the image more compared to a negative. No idea why that is, because to the naked eye the chromes look ultra-sharp. It may be one of the quirks of my Epson 3200 flatbed scanner.

I an now very keen to experiment a bit further with this film. What about trying on 4x5'? I have never seen a black-and-white 4x5' chrome, but when well done it must be spectacularly beautiful. So I am definitely going to give it a go.

I am buying these films from Guy Meurs in Diest, who is sourcing a lot of these niche black-and-white products from Germany. For development he sends them on to a specialised lab in Stuttgart. They are back in just 3 days.

The picture shown above was taken with my Contax Aria with Distagon 2.8/25mm on Rollei IR820 exposed at 100 asa.

Prison pictures

Recently, my good friend Johan Doumont invited me to join him on a photo tour at the abandoned prison at Hasselt city. It is a strange location, in a sense really out of this world. One pities the people who had to spend part of their lives in this sterile cocoon. Perhaps the guards and other personnel are to be pitied most, as, for some bizarre twist of mind, they voluntarily decided to bury themselves in a receptacle of negative, destructive energy.

It was hard to get to the heart of the matter, photographically speaking, in just a couple of hours. I wish I could have spent at least a full day there. I left with only very few negatives exposed. But I was happy to see that there were quite a few good ones amongst them. The one shown above appealed very strongly to me. It very much exemplifies the style I'd like to develop further. It was taken with a Hasselblad ELX, fitted with a Distagon 60mm lens, on Ilford Delta 100 film.

A couple of negatives showed very strange ghosting images, probably due to a second-hand Hasselblad film back I had never used before. It is barely visible in the picture shown here. In others it is very obvious. Rather than trying to correct it, I decided to leave it as it is as it reinforces the eery atmosphere of this place.