German Photographs (cont. 2)

This continues my comments on photographs I was recently archiving from our West German stay in 1971-73. Traveling in Germany during the stay, a passing rain shower was clearing and I stopped to make a photograph of the sky "drawing water". The landscape was rather flat with farm fields surrounding and a village in the distance. The resulting photograph is simple but serene:


I made another photograph of the landscape with the village in the background and then noticed a biker approaching with his dog by his side. This reminded me of a photograph I had seen, probably in Beaumont Newhall's "History of Photography." Perhaps something like a "photo echo" as Aperture Magazine has published in the past. I looked for the photograph in my copy of Beaumont's book, and sure enough these is a photograph by Bill Brandt that triggered my recollection.


I found that the photograph with the village in the background and the biker could be combined into a larger field of view image showing the wider extent of the landscape (as below).

The following Bill Brandt photograph is the one that triggered my "photo echo."

German Photographs (cont. 1)

An additional pair of photographs made during our stay in Göettingen of the Kaiserdom in Köningslutter were pieced together to display a fuller view of the ceiling leading down to the alter and the stained glass windows. Presently the Kaiserdom was just restored and you can compare with my photographs made in 1972-73 with the present restored version by going to the Kaiserdom site (http://www.koenigslutter-kaiserdom.de/default.asp?LNG=DE&NAV=66).

The restoration of the Dom is really remarkable and worth taking a look at. I made other photographs of the Dom using my 4x5 view camera, these were of the Kreuzgang and are included on my web page under the "Heritage" portfolio. Other photos were made of the outside decoration but are not on the web (photographs of the restored outside decoration are also shown in the Kaiserdom web site). A comparison of these would be of interest even though they are not of the same exact area.

German Photographs

Recently I was reviewing photographs made in (then West) Germany during our stay in Göttingen in 1971-73. The activity was for the purpose of scanning color transparencies so that they can be more available, easily printed with digital printers, and to evaluate the photographs to determine if anything of current interest might be hiding there.

In several instances I found I could use Photoshop to combine two images that had been made because my camera could not take the entire view. One instance, the facade of a church (Elisabethkirche in Marburg), one of the upper portion and the other of the lower portion were combined into a single image. The field of view of my Mamiya twin lens camera was not wide enough to encompass the entire facade(with 80mm lens). Using the digital techniques I was able to put the images together to show the entire view.