Frank Gehry at the Serpentine Gallery

It's taken 77 years of Frank Gehry's life for the first of his buildings to come to London and England, the Serpentine Gallery is the site. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to photograph the newest structure with my oldest camera - the 1937 Voigtlander Bessa.

(warning: photographic ramble follows)

This is an astonishingly challenging building, both to experience and to photograph. The whole edifice (which doesn't leak) strains your ideas of what a building should be. And yet, it is there: wood, steel, glass, massive and foursquare. I didn't look at any photographs before I visited and looking at them since, most fail to convey the sense of the place. My digital effort is here, (from a similar angle) but this shot on film using a seventy year old camera with a fixed lens is my favourite. Not just because it is the only film shot I took - I walked and looked for a while before shooting - but because it seems to contain an sense of the improbable, that combined with the richness of tone from the film greyscale make it for me.

Do you prefer the film or the digital version? do let me know. I'm particularly interested in what you think if you've seen it - do let me know (don't forget to click and look at the larger version, please).

Which version of the photo do you prefer?
	The B&W film one
	The colour digital one
	Neither are very good
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Summer in Bloomsbury Square

For this week's The Way We See It, I found myself in Bloomsbury Square. Alongside my digital, I was shooting with the Voigtlander Bessa, now sorted and ready to rock. The huge negative (6 x 9 cm) contains a huge amount of information, that is lost on the small digital image you can see, but I hope you like it all the same. The camera itself dates from 1932 - 1938, as far as I can tell.

Greenwich Flea Market

OK. I found another £5 camera on eBay. This one is a 30's Voigtlander Bessa, that produces 6 x 9 negatives. The shutter needed fixing, and it looks like there are other issues, but I got one decent shot out of the test reel.

This was taken today at the small but interesting flea market in Greenwich. Because it is slightly out of hte town centre it is often neglected, but it is certainly worth the visit.

See where on the London Daily Photo Map.