kondensat a never ending stream of pixels…

Fall in Neukölln March 16, 2024

Last summer I acquired a Seagull 4A because I was curious how it would feel compared to the Rolleiflex 3.5A that I had been shooting recently. While it’s a bit clunkier to use I think the camera actually holds up pretty well. The photos are reasonably sharp and it’s easy to use on the go. The one issue I did encounter is a bit of a reflection on the upper part of the frame (visible in the first photo here). Oh and the ever ready case is a bit stiff, I think I’ll be using the camera on it’s own since the strap is actually nice. As you can see I shot the photos in this post in fall, Ektar 100 is a very nice film for that since it has particularly vibrant colors, especially reds.

Lower Austria Dreams of Oil December 29, 2023

In late October (with incredibly nice weather for the season) I went on a Geocaching and photography walk with Eva at the Hochleithenwald. The area would be a rather unremarkable (if nice) forest in lower Austria where it not for the oilfields underneath. The forest is easily spotted on maps or satellite images because a (rather uncommon for Austria) grid of paths has been built to support the pumpjacks built in the 1980s by OMV. Oil production in the wider area has been around quite a bit longer, starting with an exploration boom in the 1930 and peaking in 1955. Currently extraction is expected to continue for another 20 years.

As you might gleam from the images I found the contrast between 1980 oil extraction equipment and the rather peaceful landscape with vineyards, small villages and moss covered shacks quite interesting.

Shipping Packages in Venice October 10, 2023

I recently had the privilege to spend a few days in Venice. Despite being a veritable tourist hot-spot I think the city is well worth a visit. Since Venice is built on a lagoon almost everything that might involve cars in other places here takes place on boats, including mail. I got a bit lucky and saw a stack of boxes waiting ant took a photo of them only to see the same boxes on a FedEx boat a few hours later. I hope the two photos amuse you as well!

Game Boy Camera July 29, 2023

Many years ago at a retro games exchange I bought an old Game Boy Camera. I had some fun with the thing back then but found it a bit sad that there was no way to get the photos off the cartridge. (Other than printing them on the fun but very low quality Game Boy Printer). Then about two years ago I got a Joey Jr cartridge dumper to backup some games and their save states. Turns out that the thing can also extract the photos from the Game Boy Camera. Since I like a good old tech / new tech mashup here are some of the photos I took with it!

Now the pictures that this thing takes are black and white and 128x112 pixels. That makes them very low resolution. (Though some people have used color filters and multiple exposures to get color images!) While this can be a fun challenge it is also incredibly limiting. This mainly shows in anything that resembles landscape photos such as the picture of the TV tower at Alexanderplatz and the picture I took in the woods. Anyway, it’s a fun retro toy and I’ve had some fun taking some party photos with it!

Gibraltar July 20, 2023

In January of this year Eva and I got to visit the Gibraltar rock! For my analog photos I brought along my Olympus Pen FT, the 20mm and 100mm lenses as well as some old Kodak Technical Pan (still got a few rolls of that lying around). The combination of contrasty film and a wide angle lens that vignettes pretty strongly makes for some dark edges but I think the pictures turned out pretty nicely!

The Pen FT is a half frame camera (it fits 72 photos on a regular 135 film) and that also means the default orientation of the photos it takes is portrait. This was pretty rare for the time this camera was released in and is an interesting case of foreshadowing to modern day phone cameras.

Ķemeri July 11, 2023

Pretty much a year ago when visiting Riga we spent a day walking around in the Ķemeri National Park and the village there. It was quite a nice day trip from Riga the whole area has the atmosphere of an old fashioned city getaway place. I took quite a few photos there, some of them with my Hasselblad 500 C/M on very heavily expired (1994!) Agfa Ultra 50. I’m frankly surprised how well these turned out given how old the film was. I also think the color pallet fits the place quite well, so here you can see three of those images!

Cordoba through Lomography Experimental Lens Kit lenses April 8, 2023

About a decade on I’m still enjoying shooting with the three lenses from the Lomography Experimental Lens Kit for micro four thirds. These three lenses where released back when I was working for Lomography and are about as quirky as their announcement trailer. The Kit contains a fisheye, a wide angle and a standard lens and it comes with little filter gels that one can insert behind the lens.

I took the wide angle lens (my favorite out of the bunch) on my trip to Spain in December and (especially on my full spectrum camera) it’s the closest digital thing to a plastic analog camera that I’ve ever used. At f8 these lenses are not exactly bright and the corners have quite some vignetting and blur but that is what makes shooting them fun. For the full spectrum image (‘Bloom’) I used the yellow filter gel. It works quite well to get a bit of a shift towards the infrared part of the light spectrum.

Gaisberg Peak View April 2, 2023

In a bit of a long running theme on here I’ve been to the top of Gaisberg at the end of last year. Given the unseasonably warm winter we had in large parts of Europe you can see that there was not a lot snow on the peak for late December.

In the first picture (“Transportation”) you can see the top most parking area in the foreground and Untersberg in the background. The second picture (“Watzmann”) is, as the name suggests, a view towards Watzmann and the surrounding German Alps. And the third picture shows Hochkogel to the left, Kratzspitz to the right and Keeskogel in the center/back (I think). If you are curious you can find a 360 degree panorama with peak names online.

Ernst-Tählmann-Park August 14, 2022

A while back I got a broken Cosina CX-2 off of eBay for cheap. I managed to piece the camera back together after some tinkering (might put up a post about this process in a bit). To test it I got out some old Fuji Superia 200 and went on a stroll through the Ernst-Tählmann-Park in Prenzlauer Berg. The area has some quite well kept GDR era buildings and monuments, it’s worth a visit! As you can see the camera seems to be doing fine and I think the expired film fits the scenery quite well.

Brandenburg Cow August 13, 2022

Sometime in 2020 a friend and I went on a bicycle daytrip from Berlin to Brandenburg and I came across this cow.