Part 3 of the Living in New Zealand series where I talk and post photos about my life and travels in New Zealand,
Read MoreCanals 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.
All the photos have been taken with a Sony A7ii and the Zeiss 24-70 f/4
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 :)
all the photographs are home developed and scanned by me
Suisse Express (BCN-Geneva-BCN in 36 hours)
A week ago I got a call from a friend, apparently it was a normal conversation, but he said he had something to propose to me, (a crazy think I hoped, and so it was).
Let me paraphrase: Dude, you wanna come to Switzerland on Monday and come back the next day at night? To which I answered: Hell yeah! But how are we gonna go there? Then he answered: BY CAR!
How could I say no to such a cool plan?! So that's what we did, this Monday we met at 9 and started our express road trip to Geneva with 1548 km to cover ahead!
But, a couple days before starting our journey, I had an inner dilema: Which camera should I bring? Should I go for 35mm? Medium Format? Slr? Rangefinder? And then I told to myself: Joan, you've been devoted to film photography since the start of the year, you haven't shot a digital camera since (almost) November of 2014, why don't you dust off your little digital travel companion for that occasion? And so I did, I dusted off my beloved Fuji X100 to document the whole experience. (Which after a long time of not using felt like shooting with a new camera and made me think about making a review of my experiences with it but that may come in another post).
Hopefully you can enjoy the photos as much as we enjoyed the trip, which was short but full of magnificent experiences.
Norderney on film pt.1
Last summer (2014) I went to Germany, concretely to an Island which I didn't know of its existence, in fact, as my german geography is almost non-existent I didn't even know that Germany had Islands.
But without even thinking about it (only a few hours ruminating) I accepted the proposition of going there to work (2 months) and therefore improve my german.
I must admit that my relationship with the island is something very peculiar, let me explain why:
I went there completely alone. So, when I arrived there, I found myself in a foreign country, don't know how many km far away from home and with a language which I had barely spoken in the last few months. (Must say it looked promising right?).
So here starts my definition of the island: It's a beautiful and a too small for anyone used to living in a city piece of land (only 12km long and barely 2km wide). And while it's a really beautiful place I had one of the worst experiences there. A few weeks there were like living in hell, countless hours of work and a solitude accompanied by the deserted island after 4-5pm plus it's never summer there( as the weather changed every 2 hours and the temperature was always cold) made an interesting cocktail which I hope to be shown and transmitted in the photos I took, as my only escape and therapy there was to have a bike ride with my cameras and walk walk walk, countless hours of walking in the endless beaches of the island.
Overall I can say it was useful, I learned a lot there (both from life and spiritually, even when having a bad time, that helped me specially) but I say this now, after almost 4 months of being back from there. Nobody can imagine how much I hated that island and how nostalgic it's making me right now to see the photos from it.
After all this amount of words here comes what I think about Norderney: I deeply hate and like this piece of beautiful landscapes hell.
All the photos have been taken with a Yashica Mat 124G and a Nikon F3 on Kodak Tri-X and Portra 400
