Exposed Photography

A visit to San Francisco

Last year I had to go to San Francisco for work. My company's headquarters is situated in Sunnyvale. There are worse places to visit! Due to a tight agenda where I also had to be a few days in Vancouver I had very little time to explore the wonderful city. I only decided to bring my Leica D-Lux4 along with me. There was not much point in carrying anything big or large on this trip. The Leica did admirably and I managed to get some great shots.
Oh yes, also of probably the most photographed bridge in the world Happy

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Antibes in the French Riviera

The EMEA headquarters of the company I work for is located in Sophia-Antipolis in the French Riviera. I'm lucky to be able to travel there a few times a year. Even though it's for business purposes it's always nice to go to a typical holiday destination. What is really nice though is that it is located near some very idyllic and picturesque villages like Valbonnes and Antibes. I've read that a lot of the world's most famous jazz artists like John Coltrane have had records made from live performances there back in the early sixties. Probably not much has changed since then...

I took my pocket camera's along for some trips where I knew I would have some spare time to go out and shoot. I've put together some images from Antibes and Cannes to give you an idea of the place and atmosphere.

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Second Revisit to Volklinger Hutte 2010

I decided to take a day visit again to Volklinger Hutte with my wife this time. She could use her new Olympus E-PL1 while I could indulge myself with my rangefinder. Last time I went there I felt there was still enough left to warant a revisit so that's what we did.

You can find the update to Volklinger Hutte 2010




Weekend trip to Germany

A few months ago we organized a trip to South-East Germany to shoot some Urbex locations during a long weekend. We had several sites planned and because of the total distance we needed to keep more or less a tight schedule. It's not the ideal circumstance for a shoot IMO, I'm rather not bound by timing limits and rather see how it goes on the spot. But in this case we needed to make some compromise.

Our first stop was the Zeche Hugo, an abandoned mine which attracted me because it has a special Locker room system where the mine workers hoisted their clothes and shoes up to the ceiling inside small metal cages. Until now I had not had the opportunity to photograph such contraptions so off we went. Because of the timing constraints we just shot the locker and went off to the next location. From what I could gather from the rest of the building, there was not much interesting stuff anyway that I hadn't already seen in other mines and factories.



Next we went to Panacolor studio's, which is the name it is known by in the Urbex community. However right after entrance we were greeted by another 'party-of-5' of Dutch photographers. The studio is not that huge with small corridors and little editing rooms. So it was immediately way too crowded for my taste, sometimes having to wait in ones footsteps not to ruin the other guys shot. The 'abandoned' aspect was also a little lost, something I like in order to shoot in a different way. So to cut it short, it was a bit of a bummer but some nice keepers emerged anyway. We went back out pretty quickly because we needed to go to the next stop while the light was still good.


Arrival at Villa Victoria-Stift. Don't ask me where the name comes from, I have no clue. Tried to find some back ground on the place via my pall google, but didn't find much. I did manage to digg up an image from the time when it was used as a Sanatorium for children. Took mostly some HDR images which turned out pretty nice I think. Upon exit we were welcomed by a short and heavy rain-storm, good test for the camera bags. Not for us, we were all dressed in t-shirt :-p


After that straight to the hotel, already in the neighborhood for the next stop: a fun family day-out in Volklinger Hutte, a former [huge] steel factory, now converted to publicly accessible industrial museum. Not much "find the entrance" stuff here but I care about the picures and Volklingen Hutte certainly has much to offer here. It was a bright and sunny day, turned quite hot as well. So I left most of the heavy equipment like the Manfrotto tripod in the car and caried only my new belt bag without the top part. If you take your time to look carefully around for nice shots you might spend a whole day and more at this place, it is that huge. It is even safe to bring the kids along, give them a taste of what other places I go out shooting but which are way too dangerous for them to join!



All updates can be found in the Urbex > germany section...

So all in all we had a fun trip, good food and drinks along the way! Also check out the snapsshots in "urbex in action".

Quick visit to Fort 7

Didn’t have time to enter the main building so made some quick snaps from the outside, there weren’t that many photo’s and I had forgotten about them. That’s why I post them this late.

Fort 7

Geoffrey Van Beylen © 2003-2011