November 22, 2009

Roundabouts of the world

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:50 pm

A rotonde is a roundabout in Dutch, so when Tijs van den Boomen and Peter Jonker set out to create a website about roundabouts and the often ugly art that is in their centres, they of course called it rotondologie.nl. (The Flemish say rondpunt.)

Rotondologie.nl has pictures, videos and stories about roundabouts from all over the world, but you can hardly blame them for paying extra attention to the Netherlands. The website is clunky at times—rather than showing you a whole story at once you get little Javascript arrows with which to scroll, even if there is nothing to scroll towards—but if you click the big Collectie button, you get a nice big site map listed by country, province and so on.

Trendbeheer unearthed a quote from the site about a Doesburg roundabout that exemplifies the wrongness of moral rights (a part of copyright):

“I thank God that [the centre piece] is not art,” alderman Fred Jansen told De Gelderlander. “If it had been, we would not have been allowed to touch it for sixty years. Everybody thought it was garbage, citizens, entrepreneurs and visitors.”

(Photo of a roundabout in Venray by Google Streetview, immortalised because this is presumably the location where the Streetview car made an infraction that caused a police car to stop it two blocks further)

Tags: , , ,

November 11, 2009

Make polaroids out of your own pics

Filed under: Online,Photography by Orangemaster @ 1:39 pm
polaroid1

Although tech blog Techcrunch ran this story this summer, it seems they weren’t really interested in the people behind the site who are — you know it — Dutch. At the risk of being told by friends that I’m playing ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (“Find the Dutch person”), a friend, Maurice Sikkink told me about one of the many sites he has, including Rollip.

Rollip is a site that lets you turn your ordinary pictures into those slightly discoloured but oh so lovable Polaroid pictures. Maurice tells me that it is almost impossible to properly reproduce these ‘fake’ Polaroids on real film, making the digital version much more desirable. People can sign up for Rollip pro and have their pictures processed with many kinds of filters. I can imagine that for a travel magazine or a 1970s article on someone’s family that a Polaroid-like picture would definitely jazz things up.

Back in the 1970s my parents had a Polaroid land camera and I still have a lot of Polaroid pics of myself, including this one, ironically taken by co-blogger Branko back in 2000. Another Polaroid I have, which I will publish if you insist, is of me and — I kid you not — Mormon poster child singer Donny Osmond.

Tags: ,

September 14, 2009

Unique Jacques Brel photo exhibition in Amsterdam

Filed under: Music,Photography by Orangemaster @ 2:16 pm
Brel1

I once read that the cities of Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris made up an interesting cultural triptych, and an upcoming exhibition of Jacques Brel photos entitled ‘Le Pont d’Amsterdam’ by his official photographer Jean-Pierre Leloir in Amsterdam seems to support this imaginative theory.

Brug 9, a newly opened Amsterdam venue under a canal bridge will be featuring an exclusive, three-day photo exhibition of famous photos of Belgium’s iconic singer Jacques Brel, taken by world famous French press photographer Jean-Pierre Leloir opening on October 9. The exhibition will coincidentally feature 31 photos — coincidentally because it’s been 31 years since Brel’s death on 9 October 1978. Thirty of the pictures are black-and-white, with one colour photo of his last concert.

Rockarchive Amsterdam’s Michelle Lemesle, a Parisienne and huge fan of Brel, is supplying the photos for this exhibition. “Jean-Pierre Leloir is the most unknown famous photographer there is and has a huge archive of photos,” explains Michelle to anyone who asks when people come to her gallery.

The event is organised by MSTRDM, Alter Fritz and Rockarchive, with yours truly DJing at the opening.

(Photo: Jean-Pierre Leloir, courtesy of Rockarchive, Amsterdam)

Tags: , ,

August 30, 2009

Alphabet created from Google Earth images of the Netherlands

Filed under: Online,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:09 am

Over at the Google Earth forums, a user called Thomas de Bruin has assembled a complete alphabet made of shapes spotted in the Dutch landscape by the Google aerial cameras.

He has created capitals, small letters, and all kinds of miscellaneous characters, such as the ten digits and the euro character. You will also find a KMZ file there, so that (if you have a copy of Google Earth installed) you can look up what part of the Netherlands you are looking at.

(Link: Google Earth Blog.)

Tags: , ,

August 19, 2009

Biologist creates own ‘Streetview’ of Spitsbergen town

Filed under: Photography,Science by Branko Collin @ 7:59 am

Biologist Maarten Loonen from Groningen figured that it might take a while before the Google Streetview cars and bikes venture deep within the Arctic circle.

His solution was to whip out the old camera and make his own “street view” of Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen. The round the clock daylight currently available there undoubtedly helped make the job easier. The result is a collection of 3,000 photos, according to Bright (Dutch), and a number of videos. Biologist Loonen took a picture every 10 metres inside the village and every 30 metres outside it.

Spitsbergen, meaning Craggy Island Mountains, has a Dutch name despite being Norwegian territory because it was ‘discovered’ by Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz. He was looking for the Northern passage to the East and died trying.

(Source photos: arcticstation.nl.)

Tags: , , , ,

August 18, 2009

Rijksmuseum features 80 Surinam and Curaçao photos

Filed under: Art,Photography by Orangemaster @ 10:13 am
foto-surinamem-rp-f-br-2009-1-00

The Rijksmuseum (State Museum) recently secured a long-term loan of some 80 photos from Surinam and Curaçao, two former Dutch colonies. The photo shown here is apparently the oldest known photo from Surinam, a daguerreotype, portraying a mixed race married couple that was taken in 1846 in Paramaribo, seven years after the advent of photography.

The lot is called ‘De West’ and can be admired as of 19 August. It also includes work from reputed photographers such as Augusta Curiel (1873-1937) and Willem Diepraam (1944).

(Link: wereldjournalisten.nl, Photo: rijksmuseum.nl)

Tags: , ,

August 13, 2009

Flickr update

Filed under: General,Photography by Branko Collin @ 3:53 pm

We have upgraded our Flickr account to the pro version, which means we can now put more and larger photos there. We use a lot of CC licensed photos as illustrations for our posts, and we’re returning the favour by publishing our own photos on Flickr using an equally liberal license.

Tags: ,

July 26, 2009

Carel Struycken’s spherical panorama photography

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:59 pm

Carel who? Well, only the most famous Dutch actor bar none.

You may not recognise his name, but you will surely recognize the characters he played: Lurch in the Addams Family films, the butler in The Witches of Eastwick, Star Trek TNG’s Mr. Homn, the Giant in Twin Peaks, and so on. He’s played countless roles in high profile films and TV series such as Men in Black, St.Elsewhere, and Babylon 5, where he is easily recognized because of his large-looking face. (Wikipedia says he’s exceedingly tall at 2.10 metres, but that’s only tallish for a Dutchman.)

But apart from appearing in almost every major Hollywood production, Struycken spends a large chunk of his time making spherical panoramas—that is to say, panorama photos that can be viewed in any direction—in the US, on Curaçao, and in the Netherlands and Germany. I seem to remember from an earlier visit to his website that the crop above is of a panorama photo from an indoor swimming pool somewhere in the Netherlands, but Struycken keeps track of his panoramas in at least three different places, and I could not find metadata for this one in any of them.

(Source photo: www.sphericalpanoramas.com. Carel Struycken’s IMDB page)

Tags: , ,

July 19, 2009

Dancing in the street

Filed under: Gadgets,Music,Photography by Orangemaster @ 4:00 pm
rock4

On Saturday, July 18, three motivated parties got together and created a real ‘happening’ in front of the Rockarchive photo gallery in Amsterdam. A group of enthusiastic rock n’ rollers from the Gel Vereniging danced until dark right on the pavement to the delight of many people, the gallery got people paying them a visit to look at their unique photo collection and Orangemaster (aka DJ Natashka) scored the music and took some pictures.

Considering the slightly somber mood of downtown Amsterdam as of late with increasingly more odd rules on how to behave on terraces and on the streets, we had expected complaints or even the police, but it was smooth sailing from 6 pm to 11 pm. Many people took pictures, a film crew came by and now more people know how cool the Rockarchive photo gallery really is.

Tags: , ,

July 3, 2009

Van Gogh’s paintings as shot by amateur photographers

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 9:06 am

The Wiki Loves Art contest that I reported about earlier is over, and all that is left is for the judges to declare a winner.

One of the extraordinary things about this contest is that the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam opened its door to amateur photographers. That must have been a frightful decision to take, what with all the paintings worth millions just a camera stand leg away from scratching, so I hope it was a good experience for them.

Painting above is The Harvest (1888), photo taken by Flickr user Pachango. View the 4,500+ contest photos here, or just the 450+ Van Gogh ones here. (I edited the colours into oblivion, but I just could not agree with the red hue that Pachango’s version had, or the yellow hue on the museum’s website.)

Tags: , , , , , ,