The Rijks Museum currently have an exhibition featuring the Dutch photographer, Ed van der Elsken which I went to see a few days ago.

If you haven’t heard, or come across this photographer (1925-1990), you can read more about him through these links above.

I resonated with many things in the exhibition. Mainly because of the era he was born into and photographed. Born just a few months before my own father, he lived in the era of B&W film photography before colour came into being in a major way.

A couple of years after the “Arab Spring” (2011), my photography changed. I moved from Morocco where I was running a mountain tourism company, to the UK where I did a MSc in Post-Conflict Development. I stopped guiding and started working in the humanitarian NGO sector, initially in Sudan, then Iraq, then Afghanistan.

Photographing mountains, pretty much exclusively, quickly became a thing of the past. Now my context was war, displaced people and misery. One in which I was initially reticent about taking photos as it just didn’t “feel right”.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Visual Clarity”. This was using the word of the Lightroom (and other image processing software platforms) tool “Clarity” in combination with examining the normal English word, it's usage, and exploring how and where the two intersected.

It was obviously playing in my subconscious since then, as one of the questions I asked in that piece was “how can we - with clarity - communicate complexities through our images?”

Perhaps the answer lies not in simplifying complexity, but in helping people see it.

I’ve been remiss for the past few months in sharing many images. Not that I’ve taken bucket loads but even those few that I have, have been sleeping silently on my hard drive. A couple I’ve printed which I’ll mention below, and that process always gives definition and reality to the images I’ve shot more than the others.

Enjoy!

Of all the tools and tweaks you get on photo editing software, whether it be Lightroom, Capture One or Snapseed (ok Snapseed calls it something different), Clarity has to be one of the most divisive ones out there in terms of opinion, methods and applicability.

YouTubers, photographers and digital creators out there all offer a wide range of opinions on this particular tool. A film title about good, bad and ugly comes to mind…

It’s the mere name of the photo editing tool, Clarity, as well as how it works, that has so many real world applications for us in these times, that I thought it useful to interrogate the word, the photo-editing application and how we visually see the world around us.

Every time I think of a title to a post, I immediately think of what image I have that would, graphically, describe that post.

Trouble is, I don’t index or tag my images…. Duh. So I’m relying on an ageing hard-drive. My brain as well as my LaCie.

When I think of this word, my mind immediately goes caterpillars to butterflies.

Not, expensive photochromic sunglasses. (it’s a super domain name isn’t it? transitions dot com. Boy do I wish I had bought that way back…$$)

When I don’t have a caterpillar to butterfly image, or whatever it is I’m looking for - I turn to Unsplash. Problem is that searching for this title in Unsplash, I get shown all of these images that look like AI. They may not be, but to my eyes, they just look too “perfect”.

As with Picasso’s Guernica, and evidenced by children that lived in Mosul during the entire time of ISIS, conflict changes the subjects depicted but creativity lives on.

Indeed during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid 90's, artists continued to create underground whilst musicians performed concerts with the background noise of sniperfire. In this context, art becomes a tool for survival.

Rather Split-Tone Black & White!

You think I’ve done a typo in the heading? Close but no cigar!

Depending on which website you read, the human eye can “only” see either 30 or 500 shades of grey. So definitely not 50! Quite a difference between these two figures and I’m sure that doing a really deep dive into some scientific journal will tell you the real truth.

However in terms of shades of grey, I’m not sure how many a typical dreary Dutch winter day has but 500 seems a bit over the top. Even 30 does.

They say Ireland has 40 shades of green although I think in all my years living there before moving overseas, the colours I most associate Irish countryside with, are green and grey. Maybe 40 green and 30 grey…

When I heard the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney say "Nostalgia is not a strategy" at Davos a few days ago (20th Jan) - and no, I wasn't actually in Davos myself 😉 - I immediately thought "that's a great quote" at the same time as mentally thinking about Fujifilm's Nostalgic Negative film simulation.

The whole idea of nostalgia is making a lot of money these days. Everything from film for cameras which is currently seeing a revival in sales; vinyls as Gen Z calls them (albums or LP's in my day); as well of course as a whole array of re-created retro toys and trinkets.

Harking back to "the day" - when everything was simpler.

Find your niche. Play to your strengths. I'm sure we've all heard those lines, or something close.

In photography terms, good principles - but do they allow you to grow creatively?

I read a Q&A post from a photography blog this morning where the questioner is anxious about trying to find their niche, perceiving it - and I'm guessing here - a place to become expert in that field. Maybe even well known. The answer from a prominent pro-photographer was to the effect that niching down (is that even a word?!) can help to find a visual style, but that if your eye is strong enough, then you can photograph anything and still have it feel "you".

By the time you read this, Black Friday will be history. For 2025 that is.

Maybe, because of the algorithm, that ubiquitous, intangible, digital spider-web that we are firmly entrapped into these days, it won’t be ‘till Black Friday 2026 (or even beyond!) that you get to find me and read this.

In any event, writing this on Black Friday, 28th November 2025, I’ve spent a considerable amount of minutes clicking Delete on the tidal wave of emails that have been arriving into my InBox over the past week. Sales, promotions and discounts.

Because I’m subscribed to a number of photography related websites, be they individual photographers, companies, or magazines, I’m getting discounts on everything ranging from mist filters to gear bags to drone courses.

And workshops…

Can you imagine?

It did exist once. At least in my lifetime.

Film photography.

Ah.

You loaded a film canister into your camera. Took some amazing images (you hoped as you could never tell there and then). The wind-on mechanism indicated you had come to the end of the roll. You wound the film back into the canister and then either sent it off to a lab to get processed – or in my father’s case – developed the negative in our family kitchen (yes my long-suffering mother) and then processed this negative into actual photographs on paper up in his homemade darkroom in the attic.

And that was it essentially.

No discussions about film, RAW, JPEG....

First things first. This is not yet another post on the merits of JPEG over RAW - or vice versa. I think we’ve all had enough of them. Rather, I’d like to develop (no pun intended) some more thoughts following my last post on the merits of taking images straight out of camera (SOOC), or processing them afterwards in Lightroom or a similar photo-editing software platform.

One of the advantages that I see Fujifilm cameras having over say the likes of Sony, Nikon, Canon etc (Leica even!) is that they have made it possible to tweak at the camera settings level, how a JPEG image looks like when the image is taken. Colours, tones, highlights, clarity etc are all adjustable. Given Fuji’s legacy as a film manufacturer, it’s not a head-scratcher to wonder why they have made their cameras in this way.

Search “intentional photography” and you’ll likely get a list of results all featuring Intentional Camera Movement. Which is fine if what you’re searching for is ICM. Such as this image…

Except I’m not.

I recently saw a YouTube by a photographer who had set himself the challenge of turning off the back screen of his digital camera and essentially manually counting the number of images he had taken up to 36. Doing his best to mimic a film camera whilst using a digital one (Fujifilm). All with one film simulation and constant ISO setting.

A number of people “out there” still hark back to film and analogue days. Maybe you’re one?

Addressing the elephant in the room - how do you even pronounce daguerreotype? Never mind what they actually are.

Well for English speakers - try “duh·geh·ruh·tipe” - and you won’t be too far off.

Fine. And…? What is it?

Well - and this is from WikiP so it must be true - it’s a photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre (French scientist) in 1837. This process was officially announced by the French government as a gift to the world on August 19th, 1839.

On a night in Zagreb, Croatia during my Balkans road trip, I happened upon a bistro which used to be owned by a prominent (Yugoslavian) photographer Josip Klarica. Although born in Belgrade (currently Serbia) in 1946, he worked and lived in Zagreb.

Indeed, not only featuring lovely local scenes, the bistro contains hundreds (literally!) of old (film / analogue) cameras in cabinets, on shelves and windowsills. Basically every flat surface you can find has a camera on it!

One caught my eye.

A Zorki 4K.

For a game that originated in 6th century India before moving to Persia (Iran) and then finally finding its footing in Spain thanks in large part to the spread of Islam, chess is taken very seriously in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

I rumbled onto an intense match between some local champions, watched on eagerly by a disapproving, gesture waving, chain smoking men-only group. I tried to initiate some conversations anxious that my camera wouldn't give another reason for two finger gestures - or worse.

30 years on since the Srebrenica genocide, during which over 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered, and the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement which put an end to the Bosnian war - I decided to do a road trip to the Balkans and Sarajevo…

Search for “Vintage Eterna” and AI Overview (!) will come up with -

The "Vintage Eterna" film simulation is a custom recipe based on the Eterna base film simulation in Fujifilm cameras. It's not a specific film stock from the past but aims to evoke a vintage look and feel, reminiscent of older color films. This recipe often features a softer, more muted color palette and a slightly muted contrast, giving images a vintage aesthetic.

Whilst I use Fujifilm cameras, they are both old enough not to feature Eterna as a JPEG simulation (X-E3 and X-T3). That being said, there are some occasions that I like dabbling in something other than B&W and/or Split-Tone.

Beautiful in colour. Fragile in nature. Resilient in thriving.

The red poppy worn around the world in remembrance of battlefield deaths has nothing to do with the blood shed in the brutal clashes of World War I - as I once thought.

Instead, it symbolises the wild flowers that were the first plants to grow in the churned-up soil of soldiers' graves in Flanders, Belgium. Little else could grow in the blasted soil that became rich in lime from the rubble.