Canals and roads. a 5 day trip to the Netherlands (Part 1 - A Place Beyond Belief)

Late August, early September. A crazy conversation, and between jokes and provocations. Suddenly, I see myself with plane tickets to fly to Amsterdam in 6 days.

Although traveling alone is awesome in all the possible ways there's a saying that goes by: "The joy of traveling is being able to share it somebody else" or something like that. Well, in this trip I can say that there's not a bigger truth. 

And yes, trust me when I say that I those 5 days traveling through Holland were some of the best I've ever lived. Perhaps I'm over exaggerating (I'm not) but you get the point.

We spent the days between Amsterdam, The Hague and Delft. An boy those cities are beautiful. I don't know how to explain it but there was an special atmosphere that it's hard to describe. 

After this introduction I'm just gonna let the photos speak for me and let you enjoy this trip as much as I did.

I'm dividing all the photos in 2 or 3 posts so you don't get bored with hundreds of images. 

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All the photos have been taken with a Sony A7ii and the Zeiss 24-70 f/4

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1 day 1 roll, a short story about photos.

I woke up, it was a dark, cloudy and rainy day, it was Sunday. I was alone and since the moment I got out of bed I was feeling a particular atmosphere. A mixture of feelings and sensations coming to my head at once.

The light of that day was so magical I decided to have a quick shower and go out for breakfast. So I loaded a roll and headed out for the best place to eat.

It was starting to rain but nothing uncomfortable, the town was almost empty, it was as if i was living a dream. And as I love this kind of days and I got the whole stage for me to photograph I tried to take the most out of it.

So, after this kind of introduction in a novel-ish shape here are the photos. I tried to take them only within 2-4 hours but only 2 of them were taken at the end of the day. That was a thing I wanted to do for some time but somehow it happened spontaneously I didn't think a lot about the pictures I just let myself go and that's what came out. 

I hope you enjoy them :)

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all the photographs are home developed and scanned by me

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New year, new goals, new Scanner!

It's been so long since I wrote anything. So first of all forgive me for writing too much, I will cut down as I get used to it again.

And second: I've got a big announcement (big and important for me of course) that I want to share with you all.

We're already a month in 2016 and I've yet to complete every new year resolution, so, I'm doing the first one of my list: I promised myself to blog regularly from the first month of the year. So here we go (I'm sorry for all this introductory nonsense).

Here's what's new. (although the title spoiled it a little bit) This Christmas the 3 magical kings (because in Catalonia santa doesn't come) went nuts and brought me the best present they could bring. A beautiful Epson V800.

Yes you haters, it's a flatbed, it's got its flaws and now everybody seems to love digitizing with a dslr or whichever digital camera they have. But dslr scanning is just not my thing. Not even with a dedicated macro lens working at a 1:1, 1:2 or 1:4 magnification with a full frame camera at the optimum aperture so I don't get diffraction and get the highest resolution. I just can't. 

Considering this 2015 has been my jump from digital to 100% film, the scanner seemed the best option. Of course we all love the new A7rii with all it has but I love film, and film makes me happy so, considering Iast year I invested my money in a big ass Medium Format film camera happiness, the V800 was and is the perfect accessory. 

The acquisition of the scanner makes me completely independent from the labs and makes me save money because after only a few months of not sending film to a lab, the scanner pays itself. 

Now I can control everything from the developing process to the final print, passing by the scanning settings, color management and so on. ( Color film by now is still sent to the lab but will sooner or later developing it at home will  become a normal thing as B&W developing is ).

So, here go my first thoughts about the scanner (I'm not gonna get technical, and I don't want to, although I could, there's plenty of information for all of you, technical photographers, here I like to talk and show things about art and feelings).

 Medium format looks gorgeus. Not even the low res files I got from the lab looked as good as my low res do now. Plus at the maximum resolution the negatives look just WOW!

35mm is another thing, perhaps it's too little and of course I still don't know nor have enough experience scanning to get the exact and perfect result I wanted to but by now I get the job done pretty easily. I still have to print the scans to see how they compare (all that technical stuff ) but by now I'm very happy with what I'm getting, although I need to improve a lot. Silverfast is a little pain and drives me nuts sometimes but getting at it.

Needless to say I've a huge amount of  "old" home developed film that nobody has seen, and now, the scanner is allowing me to see how much I sucked before at developing because there are some weird things going on on some negatives.  I should post some pictures to discuss what is going on there.

From now on we will all be able to see what I shoot and not wait years, so hopefully, expect a more recurrent posting.

Feel free to comment, or hit me via twitter to discuss and criticize everything here :)

Okay, so here they are, what we are all waiting for. The first scans or attempts at scanning. I hope you like them.

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although these are randomly scanned images, they kind of make a 2015 recap. enjoy :)

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A mountain dream

As always, whenever I can, I love to get lost in the mountains and get out of the stressful city.

That time, after a few months of stress and nerves, has arrived. But this time I decided to bring a different kind of equipment with me, normally I would carry a 5kg bag with almost all my gear, 3 or 4 cameras with lenses accessories and so on. But I thought that this time I would like to enjoy as much as possible the experience instead of spending all the time and my strength thinking about the gear and the photos. So I just brought my GoPro and the little fuji X100.

So here is a different "style" of images (as the camera/lens used is very different to what I normally use) of this amazing 2 day adventure and about 30km with a 900m total elevation gain.

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All photos have been taken by me with a GoPro and a Fujifilm X100

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