August 16, 2010

Amsterdam through the eyes of its photobloggers

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 8:00 am

Meet Amsterdam.

Perhaps all cities have photobloggers, but if that is the case, I seem to have missed them. However, the documentary photographers of Amsterdam pop up on my radar all the time. These men—always men?—aim to bring you at least one portrait of the city a day, slowly recording its history in extreme close-up.

Thomas Schlijper is perhaps their leader. A professional photographer, he nevertheless seems to find plenty of time for photographs taken just for fun. Shown here a fountain on Frederiksplein at dusk, and somebody else trying to capture the moment.

Marien van Os wants to become a better photographer, so he practises by publishing (at least) one photo a day at 1pictureaday.com. In this photo a heron stalks a fisherman on the Amstel river, waiting till the right moment.

This photo is by René Louman who often just leans out of his window to take a picture. I approve of this, because it would be a shame to waste a good window. Louman likes people. I don’t know exactly where this photo of a waitress wrestling a huge parasol was taken, but with all the fresh brick in Louman’s photos, I would guess the Oostelijk Havengebied (Eastern Harbour).

Others you may wish to check out:

  • Milo Vermeulen
  • Peter de Wit (Facemepls, whose Creative Commonsed photos we often use at 24 Oranges)
  • Marc van Woudenberg makes things easy on himself by photographing people when they look their best: on stately Dutch bikes.

Did I miss anyone?

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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)

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