On Sunday morning 2 April 2017, I joined the first TGV departure from Brussels Midi to Paris Gare du Nord.
With just a hint of daylight in the sky, I made these photos of the train on the platforms at Midi Station using my Lumix LX7.
By the end of the day, I’d reached Milan, Italy.
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Using my first Lumix LX7, I made this series of photos of the route 93 trams passing Place Royale in Brussels, Belgium on August 18, 2014.
It was dusk and the light was fading rapidly while taking on that royal blue hue that last for just a few minutes.
Effectively making photos at dusk is always a challenge. I had the camera set to ‘A’ mode (Aperture Priority).
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On a whirlwind trip to Belgium, France and Germany in Spring 1999, I made this long telephoto image of the high-speed Thalys departing Brussels Midi for Paris.
I was working with my original Nikon N90S that I’d bought secondhand from Mike Gardner two years earlier fitted with a Tokina 400mm fixed telephoto that I bought from Doug Moore in the early 1990s.
Most unusual was I was working with a short-lived slide film emulsion sold as Fujichrome MS 100/1000 that offered variable ISO through push/pull processing.
I’d rated this film at ISO 200, which gave me an extra stop over the Fujichrome Sensia II (ISO 100) that I normally used. Fuji offered processing for this film that came with a special mailer on which you would tick a box to select the desired ISO for processing.
The lighting was also unusual: it had been raining, but shafts of diffused sun light were peaking through heavy fast moving clouds.
The effect of the 400mm lens compressed the complex array of track on approach to the busy Brussels terminal.
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I exposed this color slide on a visit to Brussels with my father in May 1996.
I carried two cameras on that trip. My primary body was a Nikon F3T that I bought new from Nikon in 1990. My secondary camera was second hand Nikkormat FTN with an outer covering of red leather. I called it ‘my red Nikkormat’.
Back then, I’d usually load Kodachrome 25 in the F3T, and Fujichrome 100 in the Nikormat. I exposed film in both cameras manually using a handheld Sekonic Studio Deluxe light meter to calculate exposure.
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Here are two views made at the tram terminal in Schaerbeek/Schaarbeek in Brussels. The top was exposed on Fujichrome with my Nikon N90S in 1999, the bottom using a Lumix LX7 in April 2017.
The building in the background is the old SNCB railway station house, now part of the Train World railway museum complex.
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