Prague Without The Trains or the Cameraphone

The Grand Hotel Europa is one of the better-known hotels in Prague, along with the Jalta and the Karluv IV, and is situated on the west side of Vaclavske Namesti. This shot is unusual in that it was one of the first black and whites that I ever shot with my Pentax MZ-10, and the first time I ever shot the 35mm version of Ilford Pan F film. I hope you like it. :-)

Many of Prague's buildings are covered in sculptures, even in a relatively modern neighborhood like that around Namesti Miru. My Lomo may not have been the ideal choice for taking this picture, but it's what I had on me. :-)

St. Ludmila's Church absolutely dominates Namesti Miru, and can be seen from blocks away. "Mir" means "peace" in Czech, same as in Russian, and one could say that having a church in such a place is appropriate enough.

I shot this on the same day as my Lomo of the same scene, only this shot was taken with my Ikoflex.

This old school has some spectacular artwork on it, and although the artwork is in color I think it looks even better in black and white. The medium format film also helps to bring out the detail on this shot, I think.

This was the most recent of several attempts to get this shot with my Ikoflex. It's obvious that there would be advantages to getting it in medium format, but I had trouble with winding the film too short a distance and overlapping shots, and even this negative isn't perfect since it's dirty and poorly developed. This latter problem is because the lab screwed it up. I hope that you like it, though. :-)

The Obecni Dum, or Municipal House, was once an urban residence for the King of Bohemia, but nowadays it's more intended for concerts. I've seen John McLaughlin play here, and various classical and jazz acts play here all the time.

I took this during my experimentation with using Kodak Portra 160VC at night, and I think I can count it as one of my successes. This is the Narodni Divadlo, or National Theater, of the Czech Republic, located on the River Vltava at the east end of the Most Legii (Bridge of the Legions).

This is the Mustek end of Vaclavske Namesti, decorated for Christmas of 2006, although Christmas is still more than a week away. The purple lights on the tree are an original touch, I think.

Kotva is a large (supposedly Russian-owned) department store near Namesti Republiky in Prague, and they now have Christmas lights all over the whole store. This Christmas tree, off to one side, is in an odd spot, though.

One of the busiest Christmas setups is in Staromestske Namesti, the Old Town Square of Prague, where a stage has been set up (out of the picture to the right) for folk dancing and music.

Bata is one of the oldest shoe store chains in the Czech Republic, and I think this is their biggest and most important store, on Vaclavske Namesti in Prague (if I'm wrong on these points, someone please let me know). It's getting close to Christmas now, of course, so there are Christmas decorations all up and down Vaclavske Namesti.

This shot is one of the few normal-looking shots from my Lomo 135, although even this one has been converted to black and white in Adobe Photoshop 4.0LE.

This is my second sunset shot from the Stare Radnice shoot, with St. Vitus Cathedral in the background.

While I was up in the Stare Radnice clock tower, I also took some sunset shots, as it was dusk. I shot this handheld, as I had my Pentax loaded with 800 ISO film.

Until this day (which I think was Sunday, the 3rd of December) I didn't know that the general public could go up in the clock tower on the Stare Radnice. It just seemed incredibly unlikely to me, but in reality many of these towers are open to the public in the Czech Republic, and this one is especially famous. This is, of course, a very Christmas season shot, but in reality more attention was being devoted to the upcoming St. Nicholas Day on the 6th. On the day before St. Nicholas Day, for those who come from countries where it's not celebrated, St. Nicholas (you know, Santa Claus) tours cities in the evening accompanied by an entourage of angels and devils, looking for good and bad kids. It's a night of lots of screaming, fireworks, and the kind of anarchy that is normally reserved in the United States for Halloween or in Britain for Guy Fawkes Night. It's a little crazy, of course, but in this shot it was still a few days away, so they had a stage set up to do folk dancing instead.

This was another shot from my first cross processed Fujichrome that I converted to black and white in Adobe Photoshop. This shot looks almost conventional as a result, kind of like an antique photo.

This was from my first roll of cross-processed film (which was, in turn expired Fujichrome Astia 100), and one thing that I discovered right away with it was that it looked good when converted to black and white. In actuality, this was true for the whole roll, as you'll see from some of my other posts. It seems the photos look like antiques, not unlike what you would get if you shot black and white film in a Holga, only perhaps even more extreme. The first thing that comes to my mind are the original Niepce Heliographs from the 1820s.