Karel van Wolferen My two lives Good photography for me results from the making of an aesthetically pleasing image depicting something that no one has seen in the same way before. I first discovered this pleasure when I was 11 years old. The digital revolution has helped us greatly with it because we can now do things that for centuries had been the privilege of only painters. Multiple exposures made it possible. I have recently applied them up close to what is small and by its nature elegant of form: the macro images of flower compositions that open this website. I want them to be very sharp throughout, and I want to print them large, very large without loss of detail that shows what miraculous creatures they are. Most of the images were made with more than 150 exposures. Many of them shown here can go to two and a half meters wide. This lust for detail I seem to have had from the very beginning of this second life in photography. My first life that has occupied more time and attention, a life of exploring and writing and thinking about social life and power, began eight years later when I left the country of my birth, the Netherlands, to discover the world in a direct manner. We do not need to dwell on this here; if you're interested you can read about that life here. http://www.karelvanwolferen.com/ My life as a photographer began in Rotterdam at the age of eleven and when I could afford an Agfa Clack, which was a glorified box camera. My pocket money allowed me to buy not more than one film roll a month, which meant that I had to select my subjects very carefully. I took ages to check things before triggering the shutter. I did have a tripod and cord release, which to me made it all look very professional. When I was 14 and began a job delivering afternoon papers my manoeuverability improved along with my finances and I could build my first darkroom in our attic. It was accessed through an unstable rope ladder. By then I had also graduated to a twin lens reflex (the Ikoflex), and its 6x6cm negatives went into a primitive enlarger I had put together from flea-market bits and pieces. The limit to the number of pictures I could take was, in retrospect, a good thing. Because once I had polished my skills with lens openings-depth of field calculations, I did a great deal of photography in my mind without a camera, solving the old analogue challenges and envisaging compositions when walking, cycling and traveling by train. I have been doing this ever since. Fast forward to the 1970s, and jumping over a Hasselblad 500 period, I find myself in once-again a self-made darkroom, this time in Tokyo. I fiddled with 4 x 5" negatives after I had realised Japan’s landscapes I saw on my many car trips through the country were too majestic to be met with mere medium-format. But once I began developing sheetfilm in total darkness, I soon wondered why on earth I should spend all that time without light and other discomforts like hypo fumes, for the sake of those damn small negatives. Four times larger negatives were the answer, and photographers who have never seen the world upside down on an 8x10 inch ground glass under a black cloth will never know what they have been missing. I loved my mahogany Deardorff, which – it not being calibrated in any way – one had to play like a violin. It gave one a sense of mastery over the landscape that I have never felt since. But one typical lens for 8x10 alone weighs more than two 35mm digital cameras, and I cannot even carry all the necessary stuff on airplanes anymore. The digital revolution happened just at the time that changing sheet film in motel bathrooms (which took half an hour to make truly totally dark) became too much for me, and I discovered that as the software improved it became possible to get even much bigger prints from a stitched photograph than from 8x10. Stitching makes very high resolution possible. I can make a stitch with a fairly light mirrorless camera and a flexible steady wrist under most conditions, so I am much more versatile that way even without the panohead on a tripod that once was mandatory. You can see the reults of some of that under the relevant headings of this website. For the macro flower stitches I had of course to go back to tripod, bellows and supersharp large-format lenses. When I was in my teens a vehement discussion raged around us photography adepts as to whether or not what we were doing was an art. I had concluded that most of the time it isn't. This conclusion is fortified when I see the hordes of spectators of whatever dig their telephones out of their pockets for snapping with machine-gun speed. But the question of how what we do is different from what figurative painters have always done has been with me from those early days. I was usually frustrated by photography’s limitations that did not allow me to show the details evoking the essence of my subjects. Painters are not limited in that way, but of course they are usually not capturing an instant of reality; they have the means to convey the enduring, timeless, unceasing character of what they paint. I wanted to do both: not just freezing an instant of the time in which my subjects exist, but also to place them in their visual context which simple photography never allowed me to realize. I could attain great detail through great sharpness this with large 8x10 inch sheet film. Again, the digital revolution eventually allowed us to jump forward with that analogue material as well. Digital negative scanners and the most advanced digital printing techniques makes all manner of things visible that I could never print in the darkroom. As soon as digital sensor technology grew up I began to explore how it could help me achieve 8x10 quality outside the analogue darkroom by stitching many exposures together. That was a revelation because it overcame another photographic barrier that painters never needed worry about. The stitched images could have a field of vision that no lens could ever obtain without very much distortion. I could also get higher resolution and therefore more detail than ever before, and could make huge prints, as big as a whole wall if I wanted to. As sharpness was usually my goal in this quest for super realism in my images, things close by and far away should be equally sharp. Painters never had a problem with this, but photographers had to choose: either extreme foreground sharp and background blurred, or vice versa. How to call the photography that has now become possible by overcoming the limitations that never stopped painters? A term that came to my mind was the ‘painterly perspective’. But during an exhibition in Tokyo in 2016 that combined works from several art galleries, a French painter who was also exhibiting came to my stall and looking at my stitched still life with vase and flowers (that you can see under the relevant button) and exclaimed that no painter alive with a craving for realism can hope to achieve such realism in portraying reality.
Karel van Wolferen My two lives Good photography for me results from the making of an aesthetically pleasing image depicting something that no one has seen in the same way before. I first discovered this pleasure when I was 11 years old. The digital revolution has helped us greatly with it because we can now do things that for centuries had been the privilege of only painters. Multiple exposures made it possible. I have recently applied them up close to what is small and by its nature elegant of form: the macro images of flower compositions that open this website. I want them to be very sharp throughout, and I want to print them large, very large without loss of detail that shows what miraculous creatures they are. Most of the images were made with more than 150 exposures. Many of them shown here can go to two and a half meters wide. This lust for detail I seem to have had from the very beginning of this second life in photography. My first life that has occupied more time and attention, a life of exploring and writing and thinking about social life and power, began eight years later when I left the country of my birth, the Netherlands, to discover the world in a direct manner. We do not need to dwell on this here; if you're interested you can read about that life here. http://www.karelvanwolferen.com/ My life as a photographer began in Rotterdam at the age of eleven and when I could afford an Agfa Clack, which was a glorified box camera. My pocket money allowed me to buy not more than one film roll a month, which meant that I had to select my subjects very carefully. I took ages to check things before triggering the shutter. I did have a tripod and cord release, which to me made it all look very professional. When I was 14 and began a job delivering afternoon papers my manoeuverability improved along with my finances and I could build my first darkroom in our attic. It was accessed through an unstable rope ladder. By then I had also graduated to a twin lens reflex (the Ikoflex), and its 6x6cm negatives went into a primitive enlarger I had put together from flea-market bits and pieces. The limit to the number of pictures I could take was, in retrospect, a good thing. Because once I had polished my skills with lens openings-depth of field calculations, I did a great deal of photography in my mind without a camera, solving the old analogue challenges and envisaging compositions when walking, cycling and traveling by train. I have been doing this ever since. Fast forward to the 1970s, and jumping over a Hasselblad 500 period, I find myself in once-again a self-made darkroom, this time in Tokyo. I fiddled with 4 x 5" negatives after I had realised Japan’s landscapes I saw on my many car trips through the country were too majestic to be met with mere medium-format. But once I began developing sheetfilm in total darkness, I soon wondered why on earth I should spend all that time without light and other discomforts like hypo fumes, for the sake of those damn small negatives. Four times larger negatives were the answer, and photographers who have never seen the world upside down on an 8x10 inch ground glass under a black cloth will never know what they have been missing. I loved my mahogany Deardorff, which – it not being calibrated in any way – one had to play like a violin. It gave one a sense of mastery over the landscape that I have never felt since. But one typical lens for 8x10 alone weighs more than two 35mm digital cameras, and I cannot even carry all the necessary stuff on airplanes anymore. The digital revolution happened just at the time that changing sheet film in motel bathrooms (which took half an hour to make truly totally dark) became too much for me, and I discovered that as the software improved it became possible to get even much bigger prints from a stitched photograph than from 8x10. Stitching makes very high resolution possible. I can make a stitch with a fairly light mirrorless camera and a flexible steady wrist under most conditions, so I am much more versatile that way even without the panohead on a tripod that once was mandatory. You can see the reults of some of that under the relevant headings of this website. For the macro flower stitches I had of course to go back to tripod, bellows and supersharp large-format lenses. When I was in my teens a vehement discussion raged around us photography adepts as to whether or not what we were doing was an art. I had concluded that most of the time it isn't. This conclusion is fortified when I see the hordes of spectators of whatever dig their telephones out of their pockets for snapping with machine-gun speed. But the question of how what we do is different from what figurative painters have always done has been with me from those early days. I was usually frustrated by photography’s limitations that did not allow me to show the details evoking the essence of my subjects. Painters are not limited in that way, but of course they are usually not capturing an instant of reality; they have the means to convey the enduring, timeless, unceasing character of what they paint. I wanted to do both: not just freezing an instant of the time in which my subjects exist, but also to place them in their visual context which simple photography never allowed me to realize. I could attain great detail through great sharpness this with large 8x10 inch sheet film. Again, the digital revolution eventually allowed us to jump forward with that analogue material as well. Digital negative scanners and the most advanced digital printing techniques makes all manner of things visible that I could never print in the darkroom. As soon as digital sensor technology grew up I began to explore how it could help me achieve 8x10 quality outside the analogue darkroom by stitching many exposures together. That was a revelation because it overcame another photographic barrier that painters never needed worry about. The stitched images could have a field of vision that no lens could ever obtain without very much distortion. I could also get higher resolution and therefore more detail than ever before, and could make huge prints, as big as a whole wall if I wanted to. As sharpness was usually my goal in this quest for super realism in my images, things close by and far away should be equally sharp. Painters never had a problem with this, but photographers had to choose: either extreme foreground sharp and background blurred, or vice versa. How to call the photography that has now become possible by overcoming the limitations that never stopped painters? A term that came to my mind was the ‘painterly perspective’. But during an exhibition in Tokyo in 2016 that combined works from several art galleries, a French painter who was also exhibiting came to my stall and looking at my stitched still life with vase and flowers (that you can see under the relevant button) and exclaimed that no painter alive with a craving for realism can hope to achieve such realism in portraying reality.
Karel van Wolferen My two lives Good photography for me results from the making of an aesthetically pleasing image depicting something that no one has seen in the same way before. I first discovered this pleasure when I was 11 years old. The digital revolution has helped us greatly with it because we can now do things that for centuries had been the privilege of only painters. Multiple exposures made it possible. I have recently applied them up close to what is small and by its nature elegant of form: the macro images of flower compositions that open this website. I want them to be very sharp throughout, and I want to print them large, very large without loss of detail that shows what miraculous creatures they are. Most of the images were made with more than 150 exposures. Many of them shown here can go to two and a half meters wide. This lust for detail I seem to have had from the very beginning of this second life in photography. My first life that has occupied more time and attention, a life of exploring and writing and thinking about social life and power, began eight years later when I left the country of my birth, the Netherlands, to discover the world in a direct manner. We do not need to dwell on this here; if you're interested you can read about that life here. http://www.karelvanwolferen.com/ My life as a photographer began in Rotterdam at the age of eleven and when I could afford an Agfa Clack, which was a glorified box camera. My pocket money allowed me to buy not more than one film roll a month, which meant that I had to select my subjects very carefully. I took ages to check things before triggering the shutter. I did have a tripod and cord release, which to me made it all look very professional. When I was 14 and began a job delivering afternoon papers my manoeuverability improved along with my finances and I could build my first darkroom in our attic. It was accessed through an unstable rope ladder. By then I had also graduated to a twin lens reflex (the Ikoflex), and its 6x6cm negatives went into a primitive enlarger I had put together from flea-market bits and pieces. The limit to the number of pictures I could take was, in retrospect, a good thing. Because once I had polished my skills with lens openings-depth of field calculations, I did a great deal of photography in my mind without a camera, solving the old analogue challenges and envisaging compositions when walking, cycling and traveling by train. I have been doing this ever since. Fast forward to the 1970s, and jumping over a Hasselblad 500 period, I find myself in once-again a self-made darkroom, this time in Tokyo. I fiddled with 4 x 5" negatives after I had realised Japan’s landscapes I saw on my many car trips through the country were too majestic to be met with mere medium-format. But once I began developing sheetfilm in total darkness, I soon wondered why on earth I should spend all that time without light and other discomforts like hypo fumes, for the sake of those damn small negatives. Four times larger negatives were the answer, and photographers who have never seen the world upside down on an 8x10 inch ground glass under a black cloth will never know what they have been missing. I loved my mahogany Deardorff, which – it not being calibrated in any way – one had to play like a violin. It gave one a sense of mastery over the landscape that I have never felt since. But one typical lens for 8x10 alone weighs more than two 35mm digital cameras, and I cannot even carry all the necessary stuff on airplanes anymore. The digital revolution happened just at the time that changing sheet film in motel bathrooms (which took half an hour to make truly totally dark) became too much for me, and I discovered that as the software improved it became possible to get even much bigger prints from a stitched photograph than from 8x10. Stitching makes very high resolution possible. I can make a stitch with a fairly light mirrorless camera and a flexible steady wrist under most conditions, so I am much more versatile that way even without the panohead on a tripod that once was mandatory. You can see the reults of some of that under the relevant headings of this website. For the macro flower stitches I had of course to go back to tripod, bellows and supersharp large-format lenses. When I was in my teens a vehement discussion raged around us photography adepts as to whether or not what we were doing was an art. I had concluded that most of the time it isn't. This conclusion is fortified when I see the hordes of spectators of whatever dig their telephones out of their pockets for snapping with machine-gun speed. But the question of how what we do is different from what figurative painters have always done has been with me from those early days. I was usually frustrated by photography’s limitations that did not allow me to show the details evoking the essence of my subjects. Painters are not limited in that way, but of course they are usually not capturing an instant of reality; they have the means to convey the enduring, timeless, unceasing character of what they paint. I wanted to do both: not just freezing an instant of the time in which my subjects exist, but also to place them in their visual context which simple photography never allowed me to realize. I could attain great detail through great sharpness this with large 8x10 inch sheet film. Again, the digital revolution eventually allowed us to jump forward with that analogue material as well. Digital negative scanners and the most advanced digital printing techniques makes all manner of things visible that I could never print in the darkroom. As soon as digital sensor technology grew up I began to explore how it could help me achieve 8x10 quality outside the analogue darkroom by stitching many exposures together. That was a revelation because it overcame another photographic barrier that painters never needed worry about. The stitched images could have a field of vision that no lens could ever obtain without very much distortion. I could also get higher resolution and therefore more detail than ever before, and could make huge prints, as big as a whole wall if I wanted to. As sharpness was usually my goal in this quest for super realism in my images, things close by and far away should be equally sharp. Painters never had a problem with this, but photographers had to choose: either extreme foreground sharp and background blurred, or vice versa. How to call the photography that has now become possible by overcoming the limitations that never stopped painters? A term that came to my mind was the ‘painterly perspective’. But during an exhibition in Tokyo in 2016 that combined works from several art galleries, a French painter who was also exhibiting came to my stall and looking at my stitched still life with vase and flowers (that you can see under the relevant button) and exclaimed that no painter alive with a craving for realism can hope to achieve such realism in portraying reality.
Karel van Wolferen My two lives Good photography for me results from the making of an aesthetically pleasing image depicting something that no one has seen in the same way before. I first discovered this pleasure when I was 11 years old. The digital revolution has helped us greatly with it because we can now do things that for centuries had been the privilege of only painters. Multiple exposures made it possible. I have recently applied them up close to what is small and by its nature elegant of form: the macro images of flower compositions that open this website. I want them to be very sharp throughout, and I want to print them large, very large without loss of detail that shows what miraculous creatures they are. Most of the images were made with more than 150 exposures. Many of them shown here can go to two and a half meters wide. This lust for detail I seem to have had from the very beginning of this second life in photography. My first life that has occupied more time and attention, a life of exploring and writing and thinking about social life and power, began eight years later when I left the country of my birth, the Netherlands, to discover the world in a direct manner. We do not need to dwell on this here; if you're interested you can read about that life here. http://www.karelvanwolferen.com/ My life as a photographer began in Rotterdam at the age of eleven and when I could afford an Agfa Clack, which was a glorified box camera. My pocket money allowed me to buy not more than one film roll a month, which meant that I had to select my subjects very carefully. I took ages to check things before triggering the shutter. I did have a tripod and cord release, which to me made it all look very professional. When I was 14 and began a job delivering afternoon papers my manoeuverability improved along with my finances and I could build my first darkroom in our attic. It was accessed through an unstable rope ladder. By then I had also graduated to a twin lens reflex (the Ikoflex), and its 6x6cm negatives went into a primitive enlarger I had put together from flea-market bits and pieces. The limit to the number of pictures I could take was, in retrospect, a good thing. Because once I had polished my skills with lens openings-depth of field calculations, I did a great deal of photography in my mind without a camera, solving the old analogue challenges and envisaging compositions when walking, cycling and traveling by train. I have been doing this ever since. Fast forward to the 1970s, and jumping over a Hasselblad 500 period, I find myself in once-again a self-made darkroom, this time in Tokyo. I fiddled with 4 x 5" negatives after I had realised Japan’s landscapes I saw on my many car trips through the country were too majestic to be met with mere medium-format. But once I began developing sheetfilm in total darkness, I soon wondered why on earth I should spend all that time without light and other discomforts like hypo fumes, for the sake of those damn small negatives. Four times larger negatives were the answer, and photographers who have never seen the world upside down on an 8x10 inch ground glass under a black cloth will never know what they have been missing. I loved my mahogany Deardorff, which – it not being calibrated in any way – one had to play like a violin. It gave one a sense of mastery over the landscape that I have never felt since. But one typical lens for 8x10 alone weighs more than two 35mm digital cameras, and I cannot even carry all the necessary stuff on airplanes anymore. The digital revolution happened just at the time that changing sheet film in motel bathrooms (which took half an hour to make truly totally dark) became too much for me, and I discovered that as the software improved it became possible to get even much bigger prints from a stitched photograph than from 8x10. Stitching makes very high resolution possible. I can make a stitch with a fairly light mirrorless camera and a flexible steady wrist under most conditions, so I am much more versatile that way even without the panohead on a tripod that once was mandatory. You can see the reults of some of that under the relevant headings of this website. For the macro flower stitches I had of course to go back to tripod, bellows and supersharp large-format lenses. When I was in my teens a vehement discussion raged around us photography adepts as to whether or not what we were doing was an art. I had concluded that most of the time it isn't. This conclusion is fortified when I see the hordes of spectators of whatever dig their telephones out of their pockets for snapping with machine-gun speed. But the question of how what we do is different from what figurative painters have always done has been with me from those early days. I was usually frustrated by photography’s limitations that did not allow me to show the details evoking the essence of my subjects. Painters are not limited in that way, but of course they are usually not capturing an instant of reality; they have the means to convey the enduring, timeless, unceasing character of what they paint. I wanted to do both: not just freezing an instant of the time in which my subjects exist, but also to place them in their visual context which simple photography never allowed me to realize. I could attain great detail through great sharpness this with large 8x10 inch sheet film. Again, the digital revolution eventually allowed us to jump forward with that analogue material as well. Digital negative scanners and the most advanced digital printing techniques makes all manner of things visible that I could never print in the darkroom. As soon as digital sensor technology grew up I began to explore how it could help me achieve 8x10 quality outside the analogue darkroom by stitching many exposures together. That was a revelation because it overcame another photographic barrier that painters never needed worry about. The stitched images could have a field of vision that no lens could ever obtain without very much distortion. I could also get higher resolution and therefore more detail than ever before, and could make huge prints, as big as a whole wall if I wanted to. As sharpness was usually my goal in this quest for super realism in my images, things close by and far away should be equally sharp. Painters never had a problem with this, but photographers had to choose: either extreme foreground sharp and background blurred, or vice versa. How to call the photography that has now become possible by overcoming the limitations that never stopped painters? A term that came to my mind was the ‘painterly perspective’. But during an exhibition in Tokyo in 2016 that combined works from several art galleries, a French painter who was also exhibiting came to my stall and looking at my stitched still life with vase and flowers (that you can see under the relevant button) and exclaimed that no painter alive with a craving for realism can hope to achieve such realism in portraying reality.