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phimai
                                door
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pakman
                                crab
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Bornem
                                castle
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floating
                                tap
curiosities
Nong Kai
                                kid
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about photography


I used to make some impromptu images at opening night parties in the theatre, and preferred black & white pics. This changed abruptly when I went to India. It is simply impossible to catch the atmosphere of tropical countries without the colour. It seems that under the blistering sun, only bright colours survive. You'll never see such a richness of hues and intensity as in the tropics. With each voyage, I brought home more films...

The first camera I used was a semi-automatic Minolta reflex. The oldest travel photos made with this camera are from Morocco around 1975. The negatives are lost, so all I have are slightly discoloured prints and pepped up scans of these. To India, in 1994, I brought a compact Nikon, with a difficult ocular and the annoying habit of switching inadvertently to the panoramic option that wastes two exposures for one shot. This Nikon didn't like all the humidity that comes with the monsoon. On the next big trip, this time to Vietnam in 1997, humidity made parts of the film stick together inside the camera. The plastic mechanics of the film transport weren't up to the task of ungluing the film and lost some of their teeth. A technical guy with golden hands in Hanoi succeeded in making the camera work again... not for too long, and I lost out on photo opportunities in the Montagnard regions near Sa Pa and Bac Ha in the Northwest.

For the next trips to the Far East (1999 and onward) I used my favourite so far, a Pentax reflex MZ50. It is a lightweight camera with a 28-80 zoom lens. Since I'm together with Touché, the automatic option is used quite frequently to make pictures with the both of us. Unfortunately, during one of these self-pictures, the camera fell into a shallow pit and got full of very fine sand. The guy at the shop in Antwerp blew some compressed air into the camera and said that anything more to salvage the machine would cost more than a new one. The next June in Salvador, Brazil, we found another technical guy with golden hands who put the camera back into a vanilla state for a small price. He also had the body of a Nikon F601 reflex, but wasn't able to find us a macro lens to go with it. The search went on for some time, till my spouse presented me with a Nikkor 55mm 1:2,8 lens that I can use for smaller objects, flowers and the like.

As you can see, I wasn't in a hurry to swithc to digital cameras, not even to digital reflex cameras. For a long time, the quality of digital photos did lag way behind that of the 'old' analog ones. And most of all we didn't like the superficial trial-and-error throw away kind of work with a digital machine. On our trip to Brazil in 2010, in particular for the famous Pantanal wetland, we brought an old Sony digital reflex camera. It had a Zeiss lense, but the resolution still was quite poor, and I didn't like what it did to the colours of the incredible nature of the Pantanal. In 2011, I finally bought a state-of-the art Nikon reflex D3100 with a Nikkor 18-105mm zoom. From our 5 week Italian tour, we brought more than 5000 photos... a lot of pruning to do there!!

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