Hans van der Kamp

As a young photographer I was often asked to bring my camera to family gatherings to make pictures. Like many people I have a hard time refusing, but when it came to printing the rolls of film my attitude became less considerate. Of course I had the very best of intentions, but there was always something else that needed to be printed first. So in the end aunts and uncles stopped sending me Christmas cards as a way of telling me they were disturbed by the fact that they had not received their pictures.

I had no real excuse. It is not that I disliked the dark room — I loved to make enlargements of my best work — but printing 10 rolls of film of people dancing and drinking or both was quite a monotonous affair and I often lacked the money to buy enough photographic paper to get the job done. I could have asked for an advance, but that would have been like admitting that I did not make enough money as a freelance photographer and at that age I was way too proud for that.

With the help of a friend I switched to digital photography around 2000. Most existing equipment was expanded with digital equivalents. The center piece of that new digital studio was a Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED with ICE technology, my new dark room and I am still working with it today. It had to be repaired once, but it is still humming on my desk.

I am using the 8000 ED to digitize my archive of negatives. So, whenever I have the time I scan a few sheets and currently I have about 40.000 digital copies of negatives. When I started a few years ago I decided to pick only the best of my negatives but soon I learned that was the wrong approach. My archive has a history of its own; it was once put out on the balcony in the rain by an ex who apparently had some unresolved issues to deal with, so a lot of negatives are in poor condition. Most of these images are “unprintable”, at least that is how I looked at them, before I started using the ICE technology to digitally remove sticky dust particles and scratches caused by hopeless efforts to clean the film surface.

A part of my past is now slowly starting to reappear in nice shiny 600 dpi files of about 60 Mb each. It is a miracle. Most of the material however cannot stand on its own. My best guess is that in the end I will have about 350 pictures who can in fact be showcased on my main photography site hansvanderkamp.com. Still, I find those other photographs, badly in need of context, very interesting too.

Monday I brought a camera to my son’s graduation to take a few pictures and I ended up taking quite a few more and I was immediately struck by that old fear of how I was going to distribute the photographs to the people I had photographed. I know there are plenty of options like posting them on FlickR, but somehow I do not like posting on these sites, certainly not if the files are quite large.

So, the best solution was to install a web gallery on my own server. I have enough experience with that, because most AmeaNet member sites are built around a robust program called PhotoPost, but buying an extra PhotoPost license to distribute 36 pictures seemed overkill to me. The only option was to use an open source gallery. I have done that a few times in the last 10 years, but it always turned out to be a very bad idea because of common security risks as sql injection and exploitation of the upload directories. And I do not like the way open source coders like to brag about a few hundred bug fixes in the latest upgrade — released only three days after you have installed the software.

So, I reluctantly installed Gallery2, an open source gallery package, thinking that my pictures were not going to be on the server for very long. It was a calculated risk, I figured. Much to my surprise there was a hefty security manual packaged with the program that made a lot of sense, so after installing a gallery for my son, I started installing another copy for this weblog, because this software can be integrated in the blog with a “simple” plug-in.

The random picture in the right sidebar is created by Gallery2. For the time being I am posting some Netfinds, my own drawings, a few family album pictures, and some photographs that do not deserve a prominent place on my main photo site.

Share on Facebook