A view from the Zuriberg, looking back down to the lake with the tower of the Grosse Kirche, Fluntern blocking most of it out

The late night post bus waiting to ferry people out of town - me included.

The Ansel Adams exhibition at the City Arts Centre Edinburgh in 2008. While Adams has faded in and out of sight for me over the years, (he's back in at the moment), this show presented some of the most beautiful physical objects I've seen.

I'm afraid I've yet to see a digital print that comes close to those silver gelatin originals. Maybe haven't looked in the right places though.

In the endless struggle to organise my photographs I've arrived at the "Galleries" section. I find galleries a great source for photographs. Like airports, there is interesting light and architecture, and human beings engaged in unnatural activities. Expect a few related examples in the following days. This is from an exhibition at the Museum Tinguely in Basel back in 2006. I forget the name of the artist, but I guess this has something to do with the Last Supper.

The museum is a must visit for anyone interested in the arts - both as an exemplary piece of gallery architecture, and for the legacy of the quirky, but fun, Swiss artist.

www.tinguely.ch

An old photo I found while trawling my hard drive.

After the last post, my good friend Stewart, he of Edinburgh/Leith Daily Photo, suggested that I used my musical talents to further the visibility of Scotland in Zurich. Fortunately for the good burghers, and anyone else in earshot, this has already been done. Here (visually) is the sound of the Black Bear being paraded up Bahnhofstrasse by the Zurich Pipe Band

In a couple of weeks time Zurich will host the annual Street Parade - a techno-love-parade extravaganza which, although it seems to be much lower key in recent years, nonetheless will turn the city into..... well what it turns into depends on your perspective.

Here's some music of a gentler sort from the rather more traditional Sechselaeuten parades which take place in April. This chap is part of a Kosovan contingent (I think) - although the event is a celebration of the guilds of the city, every year there is a focus on one of the ethnic minorities who have made their home here.

The Widder is a luxurious but discreet hotel in the centre of Zürich. I've heard that this is where Mick Jagger stays when he's in town.

Widder website

Amazingly enough, it appears that the Swiss are also getting a bit excited about yob behaviour. I saw this on a Postbus recently. Anyone spot the difference?

The UK obviously has problems on a differently scale, given the relative size of the countries, but I was interested in the different approaches. Carrot or stick?

Before anyone gets in first, the Swiss approach would be laughed out of court in the more insouciant sectors of the UK where ASBO's are worn as a badge of pride. I wonder why, and what the real difference is?

Temperature was in the mid 30's for the big Zürich summer festival, so many people took the opportunity to visit the lake.

Here's a photo of some Swiss commandos.

Image from Wikipedia

This is the Swiss Guard and these guys are obviously pretty tough because it's their job to protect the Pope, and boy, does he need it. However to my eye, even if their camouflage fatigues are pretty good, they don't look as though they're prepared for a lightning surgical strike somewhere in the North African desert.

Even if they left their trumpets at home, the notion faces another obstacle. It would probably require a public referendum, and even if this was carried out cryptographically - for example in Swiss-German - the element of surprise might well be compromised.

Before anyone else mentions it, the Swiss have one of the largest armies in the world. It also has the best and fanciest military hardware that the Swiss Franc can buy, and it's all very clean, well-kept and in it's proper place. There is a belief in certain quarters that Hitler decided not to invade Switzerland during WWII because he was scared of them. There is also a belief that what worked in 1939 will also work today. Which is why Zurich is still surrounded by tank traps, and they all seem to be pointed northwards.

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978 - 2010 is on show at the Kunsthaus Zürich until September 2010. As with Andreas Gursky at Basel in 2008 I arrived with some suitably jaundiced and cynical preconceptions, but left feeling for the most part convinced.

The show is well organized, illustrating the main projects and themes that inform Struth's work. From a purely objective level it is visually very enjoyable - a bit on the lines of "well, you don't see something like that every day" but there are also many other areas to explore, and thoughts to disentangle.

Thomas Struth. Audience 7, Florenz, 2004 C-Print, 179,5 x 288,3 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf © Thomas Struth(Image courtesy of Kunsthaus Zurich)

As you enter the exhibition you are faced with a panoramic image, floor to ceiling, blocking the entrance, where people in some sort of institution gaze back in the direction of the photographer at something high above his head. Their absorption, and their seeming ignorance, or indifference, to the presence of the photographer makes you want to turn your head and search for whatever it is that has caught, and held, their interest.

You are forced to confront this, and navigate around it to enter the main exhibition space where the first series of images are from Struth's Museum and Gallery series where groups of tourists wander around among iconic art looking like so many fish in an aquarium, apparently disengaged from what surrounds them. Of course the joke is on us. After all, aren't we here to gaze and gawp as well? These images strike a chord with me - whenever I stop to consider it I find the whole gallery-going experience a rather bizarre activity.

Thomas Struth. Museo del Prado 7, Madrid, 2005 C-Print, 177,5 x 218,6 cm. Atelier Thomas Struth. © Thomas Struth. (Image courtesy of Kunsthaus Zurich)

The Prado image has I suppose several layers of this sort of thing. "Las Meninas" on the right shows the sitters being painted, some looking at the artist, who himself is reflected in the background observing the whole scene, the whole lot looking out at the mostly uninterested spectators, while the photographer ponders it all, apparently unobserved.

There's a lot more diversity in this show than these images demonstrate of course, so I'll try and and come back and look at the other themes in later posts

Today I was back on the same cafe seat where I took the original photo, this time with the G11, so I decided to investigate his suggestion.

First, here is the original image shot with the Pentax 200mm on a K7 APS-C body, no cropping this time and no adjustments

Now here is the full frame shot taken with the G11 from the same spot, at full telephoto zoom. The ashtray seems to have moved during the intervening period but I didn't bother rearranging it.

There are two immediate differences. The field of view is much wider, and the DOF is much deeper. This is because the G11's 140mm can't compete with the Pentax's 300mm (35mm full frame equivalents), the max aperture on the G11 at full telephoto is only f4.5 as opposed to f2.8 and, tellingly, the physically small sensor you get on cameras like the G11 inherently gives much less apparent DOF than larger ones at the same aperture.

You could achieve a similar effect by moving closer with the G11, and shooting at a wider angle at f2.8, but you would include much more of the background and still wouldn't get the same narrow depth of field. Meaning that you couldn't achieve the desired effect of isolating the subject.

So why use a fast telephoto? To isolate the subject, both with shallow depth of field and limiting the background. To "get close" to objects that are otherwise inaccessible - not necessarily far away. (not here of course, but we're just doing a for-example).

Before anyone suggests that I'm knocking the G11, far from it. I love the little camera and carry it all the time. Image quality is excellent and operation provides many of the options expected from a dSLR in an intuitive, un-fussy interface. (buttons and dials - not menus). We can crop that full frame image to a similar field of view as the Pentax, and although the DOF is still not as shallow (you can for example see the handles on the far away box) the clarity is impressive for such a small crop.

I don't normally talk about the camera equipment I use for the photos on this blog, mainly because I personally don't like photos where the first question you ask is "oh, what did you use for that?" - where the characteristics of the lens are the first thing you notice. However if you want a particular type of shot, then you often need a particular piece of equipment.

I bought a second-hand 200mm Pentax FA F2.8 telephoto recently. At 300mm in old money on my K-7 it's quite a long lens, and some people might be surprised to know that one of the things I intend to use it for is landscapes. The other is sports, or action photography. However I quite like exploiting its narrow DOF, and its ability to reach otherwise inaccessible objects. (The statue of Queen Victoria recently is a case in point). It's an old auto focus lens designed for film cameras, but very well regarded, and the in-camera anti-shake system of the Pentax helps counter balance the problems of hand-held telephoto shots.

And another one from Edinburgh...... this time the wee cluster of buildings below the castle that gives the view from Princes street much of it's character - but in a kind of cutesy, unauthentic, Portmeirion sort of way. Better to explore the back closes of the Royal Mile

Another photo from my brief trip to Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago. A young looking Queen Victoria. Where is this statue? Answers on a postcard please.....