I’m in North-West Germany for two weeks, arriving last Tuesday, visiting my sister who lives in the back beyond in Ostfriesland (East Frisia) right on the Dutch frontier. She and my brother-in-law, who retired last year, live in a concerted farmhouse typical of North Germany.
I brought my ‘new camera’ with me, a DSLR (digitial single lens reflex), and have been taking pictures of pretty much everything I want to take pictures of, but mainly stock photographs of the area and towns to submit to Alamy. I am now an accredited contributor (though, to be honest, anyone can become one if your three initial and subsequent submissions pass their quality control.
I call it my ‘new camera’ because although I’ve owned it for more than a year, I still haven’t quite got to grips with the innumerable variation of settings. In the 1980s, in Birmingham and Cardiff, I did a lot of photography, but this was in the pre-digital age of developing film and printing pictures. I had two cameras, but almost always used the simplest of the two, a Pentax K1000. The settings were simple: aperture, shutter speed and ASA (now called ISO, though I understand it is in some way a bit different as in the maths involved are different). That was it, but now . . .?
Here are a few I took yesterday in Papenburg, a town about 15 miles away where my grandmother was born and grew up. They are in B&W simply because I prefer B&W. They are not very interesting simply because they are just stock piccies of the town I want to submit to Alamy. The major employer in the town is a large shipyard, Jos. L Meyer, which shifted from town to a huge site on the outskirts. Where the old shipyard was has been covered and landscaped and now houses hotels and stores. The crane is from the old shipyard and, well, has been there to look nice. The others were taken a few days ago, hereabouts and thereabouts.
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