My Own Web Sites

bataviaphotos.com

Home page of bataviaphotos.com

Bataviaphotos is my first web site. It was this site that got me into web design. Back in 2000 I was the privileged photographer (and most remarkably the only professional one) to photograph the first and only sailing journeys of the Dutch Historic VOC ship Verenigde Oostindie Compagnie -(United East India Company) ‘the Batavia’.

Specially for the year 2000 Olympic games in Sydney the Batavia was transported to Sydney-Harbour. From there the ship sailed out to the Tasman Sea / Pacific Ocean.
After the events I had a huge library of some 2500 images on various sizes of film, mostly transparencies on Kodak and Fuji material: 35mm with Nikon F3, 6×6 with Rolleiflex 6008 , 6×7 with Pentax 67 and 4″x5″ with Arca Swiss and to top it off 6×12 with a Noblex 150 panorama camera.
Why all those different cameras ?
Well the Nikon was my happy shooter action camera to be carried at all time with a Angenieux 28-80mm zoom – not to miss a single moment, the Rolleiflex my general camera with 40 / 80 / 120 and 180 mm to be used for high quality images of actions I could predict, the Pentax 67 was fitted with a Fish-Eye lens only for those impossible shots and the Arca Swiss my architectural camera with 48 / 65 and 90 mm Schneiders to adjust to the the perfect perspective of the ship moored in the Netherlands and later Australia and the Noblex for the odd panorama of the decks and arrival in Sydney .

With that impressive ‘film’ archive I had “to do something”. I choose to make a book and worked on it for the better part of 2001. When ” Sailing the Last East Indiaman – Batavia” was completed I had to market it , what better way as the then still young internet? Where to go if you live on a remote property in the Australian bush ? Learn it yourself ! By browsing the web I learned it step by step and not for to long had a nice site on line.

Bataviaphotos.com was life late 2001 and from it I sold some 200 high quality hand made books over a period of 7 years. Not a real brilliant economic enterprise but a great artistic experience. It took ’till 2010 to rejuvenate that site into what it is now and probably will stay like that for ever , a fairly complete Photo Gallery of nearly 50% of my Batavia Photos. On it you’ll still find a link to the book “Sailing the Last East Indiaman – Batavia’, now as a print on demand book by the international book printer www.blurb.com. The book is printed and bound in an absolutely stunning quality !!

Enjoy the Batavia ship historic photo Archive !

rolleiclub.com

As an avid Rolleiflex user since 1974 I often visited the ‘old’ rolleiclub web site between 2000 and 2005. Then in 2006 I found it had ceased to exist. No trace of it to be found…. for a ‘normal’ visitor that’ll say. By then I had learned a thing or two about the internet and a search learned that the domain was open for use. So I bought it instantly but I had no content to speak of and the original content was one … or not ? Months of searching brought me bits and pieces of the old content and once I had the TLR pages complete I brought the site back online , in  a new design and with a forum. I promised myself to add content over time , but there was always something more important to achieve. But not giving up I finally designed a nice new rolleiclub ‘look’:

New Rolleiclub design

That new design will be the basis for a more complete Rolleiclub web site, based on a CMS (Content Management System) the site will be easier to manage and update with newly found information anytime anywhere and by selected others in multiple languages. When ? I will begin the project in the first half of 2012 !! Promise !!

sl66.com

The story of SL66 is about identical to the one of rolleiclub. As SL66 owner I also had visited SL66.com a few times before it disappeared. In a totally new design I revived it , most of the data was recovered from the Internet Archive first and later from CDs sent to me by Rolleiflex SL66 users. The site is static now, I have no intentions to change it , as the camera will remain unchanged as well. A historic document about the best mechanical medium format camera ever built . Sorry Hasselblad and Mamiya owners, but that is how it is. The Rolleiflex SL66 has remained the very best full mechanical 6×6 camera system and still fetches the  highest  purchase amounts on eBay.