During a recent visit up to Germany’s North Sea coast, I couldn’t resist but bring along my large format gear to take advantage of wide open spaces and fight against some extremely changeable weather. Here are some impressions of the East Frisian coastline in large format!
Germany’s East Frisian (over towards the Netherlands) is rugged, barren, and quite desolate all at the same time. The weather reminds me of parts of Ireland, just much flatter. I figured it would make a nice change from Bavaria’s mountains to bring along my 4x5 gear. I even had some Kodak Ektar sheets loaded, should the weather comply.
Black & white shots were taken on Fomapan 100 film and the single colour shot was taken on Kodak Ektar 100.
Our base for a week, with some incredible views of the North Sea, including Germany’s East Frisian islands.
My first shot was taken near the ferry that heads towards one of the islands. The cloudy weather was not the easiest to shoot with though.
I looked for a composition with the straight line leading from the mainland through the canal out into the North Sea. I quite like the final result. The island in the distance is Wangerooge.
This composition took me ages to decide on. I went between wide angle (90mm), medium telephoto (150mm) and telephoto (270mm), but I decided for the 90mm to accentuate the wide open space of the North Sea coast.
I am a bit disappointed with the small light leak in this image. Those large format camera shooters reading this will know how fragile the film sheet holders can be, and some of mine do not have the small closing pin that secures the sheet and stops it moving. Unfortunately for me, this is exactly what happened when I was rummaging around my bag looking for a different film holder.
I wouldn’t mind if it were black & white film, but at €5 a shot (not counting development) for Kodak Ektar this kind of mishap can be quite infuriating.
As I had taken so long to setup the composition, I decided to take a black & white shot too. I even went to the extreme with a red filter to test this out, as I don’t use it that often. I took the shot quite quickly after the colour one above, and it is amazing to me how quickly the clouds changed - the North Sea is a windy place!
I sneaked in a phone shot as I was driving along and saw this nice composition.
Obligatory wind farm shot. They seem to duplicate in number of wind farms every time I come back - great for photographers as they make quite good subjects in an otherwise flat and boring landscape!
The very quaint town (probably not big enough to be classified as a town) of Carolinensiel, population circa 1,300.
I am blown away by the sharpness of these two images - you should see what the negative looks like on a light table! Really happy with how these came out and definitely images to be printed big!
Overall observations
It was really nice to have the extra time to practice my large format photography skills, although I must say the weather in this part of Germany is not particularly agreeable with the slowness and long-time-to-setup process for large format. Case in point - I had a wonderful double rainbow in front of me in the above shot that I obviously decided would look great on Kodak Ektar film. But after setting everything up the rainbnow was gone and it nearly started raining on me! But other than that, I really enjoyes the time in working on large format at the seaside, it is somewhat harder to find a good composition with such large open spaces, but I enjoyed the challenge.
I love this part of Germany, and if all else fails with your camera setup there are plenty of locals that will happily have a beer and a chat with you.
See you next time on more large format adventures!
Neil
