You may know my blog post about me visit to Berlin this year. I found it a little demotivating to work with the constraints of the layout of my blog and the web in general, and viewing photographs on a computer screen in a web browser is equally rewarding. So I decided to make a book. A book with many colorful photographs I took in Berlin in the past years, accompanied by some personal notes and stuff.

Since it’s priced at very juicy 50 Euros I don’t expect that any of you actually buys it but then I thought “what the hell” so if you’re feeling rich and out of your senses and want to cast a smile on my face then buy one and give it to your friends (or foes).

Thanks for reading!

This is a short photo-blog-post of my impressions.

Berlin needs to be experienced best through the microscope of everyday experiences. Berlin is detail, it is a patchwork of delicacies woven together by stretching alleys and slowly crumbling houses. Berlin is chipped-off paint on pre-war buildings, covered in stickers and iced with graffiti. They look all the same from afar but become more and more discrete the closer one looks.

But don’t get lost in the details. Enjoy the sun, enjoy the wind, enjoy the low prices and the smell of coal and smoke in the winter.

Berlin is flat. At least in Google Earth it is. Once you roam the sidewalks they are an uneven terrain for the unassuming traveler flipping the flops. Right now one of my feet rests on a loose cobblestone in a shabby little café. Every café is shabby and small but every single one is it in a different way and offers different specialties. And no table is stable enough to keep one’s drink from spilling.

The wall is long gone yet every day I wonder where it led through. The former east looks like the former west, the former west looks the same while pretending to look eastern.

Drug dealers do business in subway stations while young mothers talk to their kids in German and English about the colored tiles. A crazy man rambles drunkenly, a bottle slowly rolls towards the platform’s edge.

Spanish, English, French, Turkish and German are the stones in Berlin’s mosaic of impressions, shimmering like the tops of girls playing soccer in the Görli-Park, a rare event as I have been told.

Everybody smokes. Everybody coughs. Everybody walks their dog. Everybody has a gay friend. Everybody has a tourist friend. Everybody is polyamorous. Everybody meet anybody on the city trains. Nobody looks back.

Pedestrians are noticed only when they cross the streets in numbers, paying no attention to the color of the Ampelmann streetlights. Only sometimes women are gallantly allowed to pass in front of vehicles so their drivers can catch a good glimpse at the lady’s ass.

The subway stations smell like any subway stations and the night is as dark as the night is anywhere. Yet the train cars smell slightly different and the clouds move slightly faster.

Nobody looks at you when you look odd for everybody looks odd in their own way. Steady currents of people mingle in Kreuzberg an scatter in Mitte.

Meeting people is easy, getting to know people is incredibly hard.

I leave my mark.

I embrace Berlin.

But wait, there’s more!
There also is a photo book available now with many many more colorful pictures. Check it out if you’re interested

Usually I don’t like the winter. It’s cold outside, I am cold, I can’t wear my favorite clothing (hawaii-shirts and flip-flops), I have to dig out the car whenever I want to drive it, then it’s cold in the car and the snow-clots on my trouser legs melt and run into my socks while driving and then I’m cold again.
Still, when I think I can’t take it anymore, it snows again. Heavy flakes tumble in the air before resting on the ground, little by little covering up all the unpleasant details and the dirt, muffle harsh sounds and immerse the open land in innocence and tranquility — right before my window. In these moments of joy and inner peace I linger at the window, sipping my coffee. And then it strikes me: “I gotta take some photos!”

But this year I refrain from taking the same stereotypic winter photos everybody shoots every year (with some exceptions, of course). I wait for a spark of inspiration. Imagination. Whatever. And this year it came in the subsiding dusk of yesterday’s evening when I got off the Autobahn.

There it was, the cell phone relay station with its two metal halide floodlights turned on. For absolutely no reason it illuminated divinely the surrounding field of pure, inviolate, foot-deep snow. Right between the freeway exit ramp and the autobahn itself was a glowing blue patch of no-man’s-land. I drove home to get tripod and camera to record this strange sensation, and I even dared to leave my tracks in the untouched snow, but kept a respectful distance when taking pictures.

When I came back home, there was the light from outside illuminating not only more powdery snow right before my window, but also my room from a very low angle. It never occurred to me, that when I would turn off the lights I would be rewarded with another artificial light source creating an odd, yet very interesting atmosphere. Click — I took another photo.

This is just a little test to see how my sytlesheet is working for flickr blog-posts. I am not sure whether I want to say good-bye to the great NextGEN Gallery plug-in for WordPress I have been using all those years now. Should I really switch to flickr? What do you think?

And by the way: You just witness a major design-wise relaunch of the Promenade Blog, after the years I got a little bored with the standard visual appearance of this WordPress blog, so I stared in August 2007 a major redesign. But today I finally finished it in a couple of hours for the next couple of years. Although everything seems okay on first glance, there might happen some strange layouts on some pages — to be resolved soon.

Sometimes a scanned negative looks just like the one in the picture: Although there’s an area, like the snow, that should have a coherent tone, it’s sometimes darker and sometimes brighter – there’s even vignetting on the right side. In the darkroom this means to dodge and burn until you get away with it but this takes usually a lot of time. But in Photoshop everything’s a little easier.

1. So lets open the image we want to correct.
2. Now choose Layer > Duplicate Layer and hit Enter or just drag in the layers-panel the background layer onto the icon with the new sheet, the 2nd icon from the right.

   

3. Now with the focus on the new layer choose Filters > Noise > Dust & Scratches. Here you enter a very high value for radius and a 0 for tolerance. We want our motif to disappear completely so only a blurry gray with the incorrect levels remains. Then hit OK.

   

4. Now hit the shortcut Ctrl+I or go to Image > Adjustments > Invert to turn the blurry layer into a negative.
5. In the layers-panel keep the focus on the blurry layer and change its blending mode from Normalto Overlay.

   

6. That’s it – your image should have improved apparently. Notice the soft and realistic contrast in the picture.

How it works

The pixels of a layer set to Overlay change the layer(s) below in the following way: The RGB-value of pixels brighter than #7f7f7f (that’s exactly 50% gray) is added to the pixels of the layer(s) underneath, RGB-values darker than #7f7f7f are subtracted from the lower layers’ pixels.

Sounds a bit confusing but in our example it means that our blurry negative softly compensates the wrong tones in the original. A downside may be the resulting lower contrast, but usually that’s what we want to achieve in these cases.

But yesterday I managed to visit Foto Köberl in Graz and bought five rolls of the Acros along with an Ilfosol-S devloper. Bad choice because the only thing I found so far on the combination of Across and Ilfosol-S was in the archives of photo.net where Suzuki-san wrote on the day of my 22nd birthday the following:

Ryuji Suzuki , sep 06, 2005; 02:25 a.m.
I suggest Acros 100 at EI 32 for 7.0 min, and EI 80 for 8.5 min in Ilfosol-S 1+14 at 20C. I don’t recommend Acros 100 at EI 100. (To advanced darkroom workers: developer DS-2 and DS-12 work very similarly to Ilfosol-S in terms of development time. Use DS-2 or DS-12 at 2+1 strength for this film. That is, two parts developer plus one part water.)

Okay – so overexpose the film 1/3f-stop. But I didn’t know about this when I was strolling down Herrengasse to Foto Ehmann (link defunct) while taking pictures with the Acros. There I bought a Fuji Provia 400F, a positive color film that is said to be pushable up to 3600 ASA (!) with good results for 9.50 € – expensive! One roll of Acros 100 was with 4.00 € even cheaper than an Ilford Delta 100 which costs 4.40 € to 4.20 € (Foto Mayrhofer or Foto Kücher in Salzburg).

Anyhow I am eager to develop the 4 rolls of film I shot the past couple of days. Results will follow!

Corners

One of the first things to find out about was the cornering on the negative. Unfortunately it takes you at least one film to find out. And this one was my second one. On nearly every exposure there was this intense light on the lower left corner. On a closer examination I found out that it was dependent on the intensity of the environmental light. The brighter it was during the time of shooting, the brighter grew the corner (see picture).

Streaks

And it grew extremely worse when pointing against the sun. In that particular case there got so much light onto the negative that the whole exposure was just unusable for any further processing – bright streaks of light along with a very intense cornering effect made all the preparations for every photo in vain. At least I didn’t start with a commercial photo project.

I suspected and still suspect the film magazine leaking light when operating the dark-slide of the magazine. This would match the shape of the corner and the fact that only intense light causes those unwanted exposures within my negatives.

The next day I took the other magazine, being extremely careful when operating the dark-slide and covering its ridge in the magazine as soon as I took it out.

After developing today’s film I noticed no corners or streaks during my first quick inspection of the wet film. So far, so good.

But when I scanned some of today’s photos I’ve noticed another two unwanted phenomena:

Decay of light & radial blur

As if cornering and streaks weren’t enough, now I was faced with a strong decay of light towards the edges on every exposure. Now that was new. The only thing I noticed was that it grew a little sharper when working with an f-stop of 22 – big surprise…
Here I suspect the lens screen being a tad too protective and looming into the POV. On the other hand I’ve also used the lens screen when shooting the other film – with no decay of light.

The radial blur was also new – or at least I haven’t noticed it so far. Only the center of each exposure was crisp (provided that there also laid the focus). Towards the edges it grew blurrier and blurrier. Barely noticeable but impossible to ignore. For this possibility I’ve also developed some theses:

1. the lens: Maybe the lens itself isn’t as thoroughly fabricated as Zeiss-lenses. On the other hand I’ve read more than once that Kiev lenses are said to be good in quality.
2. the lens-mount: Maybe I didn’t lock the lens properly on the body or it untightened itself during photographing. Both cases are rather unlikey but need to be considered though. Maybe the sunscreen wasn’t locked on the filter thread and hence longer than it should be?
3. the film: Maybe the film curled a bit in the scanner so that only the middle is perfectly in focus during the scanning process. Which is also unlikely because in that case every frame would be dome-shaped on the film with is also very unlikely.

Solutions?

The only way of enforcing certainty is 1) to see how prints in the darkroom look like instead of pondering digital scans and 2) to load another film and to photograph a lot – another time. The next time without lens screen and/or filters, with the “good” magazine with passable cornering.

But I still think that the price was just too good to be true… Time will tell.

So the first thing I did the next day was to take Lisa for a ride, visit the ATM and drove to downtown Salzburg where Foto Mayrhofer is located, a stone’s throw away from my favorite café in Salzburg, the Café Fingerlos.

We went in and asked for the Kiev — it was already sold to Germany. I was crushed but then I was told that there was a second Kiev BiG-six with the same equipment — and the same price. I was happy again and while thoroughly examining the dusty camera I realized that it was in very good shape. While chatting with the shop-owner I was surprised how competent he was — he even knew about the Kiev 800′s flaw of being equipped with brass parts inside the body, resulting in bad reflections on the film.

He told me that the camera’s previous owner was an old man who loved to photograph but mustn’t carry heavy things, such as the Kiev, which weighs with equipment nearly 4kg.

I was so happy about the price of mere 290 € that I bought a bunch of Ilford Delta 100 films with it and went with Lisa straight to the Café Fingerlos where I wanted to load a film in one of the magazines. But there already was a film loaded! Some kind of Fujicolor 100 ASA film, probably the last slide film of the old man. Quickly I put it back and exposed it completely and took it out. Maybe I will have it developed and give the photos by the old man back to him as a gift. In the other magazine there still is another film, 400 ASA. Color too, I suppose.

Back home I cleaned the camera and it’s parts for two hours — now it looks brand new.

Unbelievable how much I got for my money. This type of Kiev with all the equipment costs about 850 € at Brenner. The equipment shown on the picture includes:

• 1 x Kiev B.i.G.-six camera body
• 1 x 80/2.8 lens
• 2 x type 120 magazine (6×6)
• 1 x UV filter
• 1 x yellow filter
• 1 x rubber lens screen
• 1 x winding crank
• 1 x TTL viewfinder with exposure meter
• 1 x viewfinder + lens

• 2 x Exposed films
• 2 x Ilford Delta 400

What is not shown on the picture but was also included:

• 1 x carrying strap
• 1 x bag
• 1 x German manual
• 1 x viewfinder + lens (not working properly)

I can’t wait for the first developed films but on the other hand I don’t want to just point and shoot at anything just to have the film exposed.

I still have to getting used to this type of medium format camera which feels more like a Mamiya RB67 than a Kowa Six MM which I also like for its easy handling. With the BiG-six every once in a while I forget setting the correct f-stop on the lens resulting in an incorrect exposure. Although I think of me being quite skilled when it comes to loading film I had some major struggles at first and it took me about an hour and I dumped one film until it worked properly. The first film is exposed until frame 4. Totally exposed. And from then on it is completely dark. Luckily I bought four films on Friday for the weekend.
Despite all my struggles working with the BiG-six really is fun and a lot of Russian passion flows from the camera back to me. Big time!