Above/featured: U2 train departing Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten station – 28 November 2021.
I look back at an eventful 2021 year with 21 images with personal questions about how impending- and actual-loss affect how life proceeds beyond death, and how feelings of real belonging are different from feelings of a proper home.
Above/featured: S-Bahn station Messe Nord/ICC – 27 Nov 2021 (X70).
I’m going home to Berlin, for the 1st time in 4 years.
To travel at all, and to go international, is a big privilege; I’m grateful for the window of opportunity.
After a long gruelling emotional 2020 year taking care of an elderly parent at home with cancer and accompanying them safely to their final days, I’m desperate to get outta Vancouver for a break. But another 9 months pass before the largest roadblock to travel is dissolved. At the end of October 2021, the Canadian government releases a digital vaccination certificate suitable for domestic and international travel. Within a week, I have a set itinerary using credits from a cancelled trip.
The following describes plans and unconventional sights for Berlin, Germany over 11 days in the 2nd-half of November 2021. As case counts change and situations evolve at both ends, travellers must remain vigilant with extra preparation and adapt to changing policies, protocols, and requirements by different countries for visitors, ensuring safe and smooth travel, out and back. I go over all guidelines supplied by Germany’s Federal Foreign Office and the city state of Berlin.
I’m not going to lug my DSLR camera and extra glass for this quick trip. Instead, I’ll only use my 340-gram (12-ounce) compact fixed-lens camera. In all respects, it’s a big weight off my shoulders.
Above/featured: After Girard: Vancouver-Strathcona, 14 Oct 2021.
The Fujifilm X70 mirrorless fixed-lens prime camera has been a real boon to my approach to photography for personal projects both domestically and internationally. To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve provided examples of X70 images made with two Fujifilm analog-film simulation (film-sim) recipes:
• Ektachrome 100SW (saturated warm), simulating images with the Kodak colour transparency or slide films produced between 1996 to 2002;
• Kodachrome 64, simulating images with the Kodak colour film produced between the mid-1970s and 2009.
In this post, I examine the Kodacolor film-simulation, a reproduction of which Fuji X Weekly’s Ritchie Roesch describes as “producing a classic Kodak analog aesthetic.” According to Roesch, the digital film-simulation is closest to Kodacolor VR analog color film from the early-1980s, whose ISO200 version is still available for purchase as “ColorPlus 200” (Kodacolor 200).
The following film-simulation recipe creates images similar to the look of “Kodacolor VR 200 (film) that’s been overexposed.” My X70 settings are:
The recipe above is for the X-Trans II sensor; the corresponding recipe for an updated or more recent sensor is found here. All other recipes sorted by specific sensor are found here.
The following images were made at locations throughout metropolitan Vancouver. Minor adjustments to brightness level, rotation, and geometric distortion have been applied from straight-out-of-the-camera (SOOC) to posting.
Above/featured: Left: “Search”, by J. Seward Johnson Jr. (1975). Right: “Solo”, by Natalie McHaffie (1986). Devonian Harbour Park, 14 Jul 2021 (X70).
Based on what we see in person and online, the quickest version of street art may be defined by the variety of art appearing on side walls of buildings, big and small. Most will think about paint, graffiti, and murals, all of them in the here and now. But we shouldn’t forget any art that’s out on the streets and publicly accessible.
Below are a handful of examples of public art in the city of Vancouver; the following is a visual expression of my fondness for sculpture whose origins sweep back to the 1st-half of the 20th-century.
Above/featured: Night glow on a black tub-chair at a bus stop – 7 Oct 2021.
The intersection between modernity and ordinary is extraordinary in its vast reach, covering all corners of the planet by land, sea, and air. Consider what we have in our homes, and how much or little of it will get recycled. We might pause to consider how a piece of furniture lives or is used by a family; how they must have once been excited to buy chairs, couches, and beds, only to throw them out when they were deemed surplus to requirements, how much is tossed out in a regular or periodic “clean out” and/or in the process of moving out from a residence.
Below are images of abandoned items, whose likely destination is the dump.
Fotoeins Fotografie 