Three chapters from Memmingen

Last weekend my friend Bas Stubert and I went to Memmingen to relax a bit and eat Schweinshaxe and drink Dunkelbier while taking in the surroundings. My photographs from the trip can be categorized in three chapters:

The lucky shot

We just got off the boat in Bregenz (Austria) and were wandering along the harbour while this guy on his bicycle overtook me. He went straight for the railing and parked his bike to watch over the Bodensee. I thought this would make a nice little subject so I followed him to get a little closer (I didn’t want him too small in the frame) but at that moment the ferry blew its horn three times and a whole flock of pigeons that had been sitting on the grass to the right took off. I wanted to get this! Fortunately I had my 135 mm already on the 645D, but the cap was still on and as I grabbed it the wrong way it wouldn’t come off. The doves were still in one swarm but had all but passed the guy with the bike so I turned my hand slightly and yanked the cap off while bringing the camera to my eye. I followed the swarm to the left while focusing and shot a photograph (which turned out to be utter crap) while still focusing. But lucky for me, the swarm decided to turn back and pass the guy once again. I stopped focusing because there was no time *snap* I hit the shutter while fortunately keeping the camera pretty straight, immediately I checked focus again in the viewfinder, looked all right, and pointed the camera slightly higher to have less foreground in the frame but the doves were pretty much gone from the scene by then. So this is a slight crop of the second photograph and I added some sky from the last one so I could remove some foreground whilst keeping the 4:3 ratio.

Pathetic
I think this is typically Dutch but call me wrong if I am please. Many Dutch live by the “doe maar gewoon dan doe je al gek genoeg” mantra (Google translate: act normal, that’s crazy enough) which tends to lead to “lullige” (Google translate: pathetic) subjects in photography. Enter: Hans Aarsman &c. I like it though, and in this tradition I shot the following two:

Nature
It never ends… Trying to see the light, shapes, colours.