Yesterday my wife and I spent some lovely time at the beach of Scheveningen near the city of The Hague. We went to a musical and enjoyed lunch at one of the many beach clubs. Because of the photographic opportunities I took a camera with me. I opted for the the DP1, because of the simplicity and gorgeous image quality.
The diversity of the people is just wonderful. People from all over the world. And another photographer with a Leica M8, zone focusing his camera, was patiently waiting for some street shots, including of us, until I kindly showed him the camera I had with me. He laughed and I told him he was an even more lucky guy than I was.
It stayed dry, but we had somes dramatic skies over the sea.
A cool scene with a seagull on top of the life gaurd post.
These type of beach resorts all seem to be stuffed with shops to buy food or candy, and of course don’t forget the souvenirs. Mr. Candy is no exception.
And since restaurants and food places are all over here at the boulevard, you can find seagulls too. Sea pigeons I like to call them.
I thought this photograph of my wife at beach club Zeezicht came out pretty well with the back lightning.
The “Scheveningse Pier” is the most recognizable landmark here. An incredibly ugly building of concrete and steal at the beach, but great for photography when the sun sets down.
At ebb some seagulls search along a pier for food.
I had to photograph this purse for a my friend Helen from NY.
All photographs by Wouter Brandsma
Wouter Brandsma 
Nice series of shots, capturing some dramatic skies.
Thank you Yes. In the meantime I have still no leads to the mystery Wolters guy with the fish.
Very nice set.
Great series, my favorites being the second shot, the portrait of your wife and the pier with its dramatic shadows. One notices you were relaxed and could take your time to do these shots!
Thank you Andrew and Fabian. I was relaxed and didn’t need a photograph. I wanted to have fun, relax and enjoy the time together. Every photograph I could take, was an additional gift for a beautiful day.
“The diversity of the people is just wonderful.”
The world is a beautiful place because of wonderful people like you. In this day and age of racial discrimination and hate your words and thoughts are fantastic.
Best regards
Sudeep
P.S The pictures of course are wonderful, and I remain one of you biggest fans!
🙂
You’re so welcome Sudeep. I guess we both hate the current sense of stupid xenofobia. How can we judge people who we don’t know or understand? We are entitled to be different, as long as we respect each other.
Cheers,
Wouter
Excellent series, Wouter !
All the best,
Nick
Thank you Nick. Added your LX3 blog to my blogroll.
You have done a great job with the DP-1 using black and white! The Sigma really is excellent for monochrome, it seems. Are you setting the camera to shoot monochrome or do you take out color in the software? I think you shoot Raw so it must be in the software. I’m also amazed at how the Sigma interprets the sky. It’s almost as if you used a yellow or red filter that preserved clouds and texture rather than washing them out. I’ve noticed this on Flickr as well and in color shots with the Sigma. Anyway, great work and thanks again for your excellent review with hints. Someone can spend hours reading people arguing back and forth over the DP-1. I’m surprised at the anger and the defense that this camera seems to have generated on the Web. But I agree with your review: the pixel peeping is a complete waste of time: when people take a stamp-sized portion of the frame, compare to another stamp-sized portion, and then argue endlessly.
Frank Weir
The DP1 is absolutely great for B&W. I do shoot RAW and edit the photographs in Lightroom or Adobe ACR. After that I do some additional editing in Nik Silver Efex Pro. Maybe not the usual thing you see from the DP1, but something I want to do with it.
Oh yeah, pixel peeping is a waste of time. I don’t understand that people find all the time of the world to complain about the camera and have hardly any patience to wait 5 seconds to take another photograph.
Cheers,
Wouter
But it seems to go deeper than that. I am just reading Get DPI and a gentleman there seems very angry over his DP1 experience. He claims he had to PhotoShop EVERY DP1 image to get something even remotely usable. And he got almost NOTHING worthwhile in the six months he had the camera. I am baffled by this even with my short five day experience with the camera. I can’t understand how you could get next to nothing worthwhile in SIX months with he DP1! It’s just a machine and you have to learn it and work with it. People seem to take the camera’s performance very personally. It just seems like everyone has been spoiled by digital and find ANY limitation to THEIR very specific needs to be a personal affront that renders the DP1 completely worthless. I don’t think I have encountered this kind of anger in any other Web discussion of a specific camera since the advent of digital. I just plain don’t understand this. As to focusing, if THAT is what hangs people up, I want to experiment with zone focusing in manual focus mode. Seems to me you could set the lens at about 3 feet and at f8 just about everything would be in focus. Then shooting would be very fast except for image saving but so what? It’s not meant to be a sports camera. What am I missing here?!? Thanks for reading Wouter!!
Maybe it has to do with expectations, personal creativity (or lack of), and technical capabilities. But honestly, I just don’t know. I feel sorry for them who think a camera should always take better pictures. It is not the camera, the camera is just a tool, some cameras may be more user friendly than others. But is all what you can do with the camera.
Zone focusing is a method to cope with the slower auto focus, manual exposing helps too to make the camera more responsive.
Have fun, experiment and photograph. Thank you for reading too.
Wouter
I really like the first picture. Agree with Frank, you have done a wonderful job with the DP1 and really driven the point, that it is not the camera, but the photographer. Does the bigger sensor feel better to you?
For scenes with long and strong shadows the small sensor is fine, but for all other situaties the bigger sensor feels indeed so much better to me. It is not so much the dyamic range that matters to me, but the extended tonal range does make huge differences.
FOUND IT….. LOVE IT
Hats off to the Man…LOVE YA Wouter
I knew you would find and love it Helen 😀