As it was planned we moved to our new home in mid July. Not everything was complete when we moved in. We had still some work to do in the staircase, in the garden and some other small things. But we have learned that such a project will never be finished. You have to set the end by yourself at some point. Then later on you can improve these things that bother you.
However the Farmhouse project is a success story of its own and the final result is amazing. We didn't have any major problems, and small issues could be discussed and fixed quickly. The collaboration between us, the architect, the authorities, the contractors and craftsmen was very pleasant and efficient. The house is back in position and looks very nice.
I took some pictures last sunday, it was a great day. The picture on the left was taken from the other side of the street, and for the picture on the right I was standing on the property. On both pictures one sees the facade heading to the south.
On the left picture you see the freshly painted staircase which gives access to all three apartements. The picture on the right and the 3 pictures below show the interior of our appartement which is on the first floor. All three apartments have their own charm.
I shot all these pictures with the Olympus PEN E-PL1 and the Olympus 9-18mm F4.0-5.6 Four Thirds lens. The outdoor shots have been taken freehand and for the indoor shots I used a tripod. I did not use any flashes. I used this lens for the first time on the E-PL1, usually I use the E-3 with this lens since it is a Four Thirds and not a Micro Four Thirds lens. But with the corresponding adapter (Panasonic DMW-MA1) this is a great Duo (or Trio, with the adapter). Because of the contrast Autofocus of the E-PL1 the focusing is not as fast as it is on the E-3, but it is accurate and works very good for this kind of photography.
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After maybe half an hour, we changed to the inside of the house. I used my favorite combo for indoor real estate shooting, the Olympus E-3 with the Zuiko Digital 9-18mm/f4-5.6 and two RC enabled Olympus flashes. Compared to my other sessions I had an assistent this time, Laurent supported me with positioning one of the two flashes. And that was very practical. I tried to set up the flashes according to the natural light to avoid artificial light effects. But this was not always easy and I did not succeed all the time. Indoor real estate shooting takes time. There were six rooms plus kitchen, toilets and floors to photograph. I had one hour, since I had an appointment with my wife later on. This makes about 5 minutes per scene, and that kept me very busy. I have set the camera to manual mode, aperture to f5.6, metering to spot and flash control to TTL for most scenes. When entering the room I pointed the camera to the window and set the exposure value to have the window correctly exposed. Then I made several shots with different compositions and flash configurations. If I had to much light even at 1/250s I further stopped down a little bit.
After all I am quite happy with the output, though I could have done better, especially with some more time. Anyway I hope that Laurent Bourqui may use these photos and will find somebody who will rent his nice house very soon. If you are interested, just contact me, I will redirect you to Laurent Bourqui.
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Kitchens are installed, and the floorer has already started laying out the parquet, at the end of next week, most things are finished. Then we can start cleaning the site.
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The new windows have been installed, floors including heating are basically completed. Now comes the plaster on the walls and ceilings. Then we have to wait some weeks before laying the parquet floor, until the base floor dried out completely. In the meantime we will paint all the walls and ceilings, Marianne, my wife, and I will do that by ourselves. Let me know if you would like to spend some time to help us painting walls :-)
]]>The following two pictures show the farmhouse from two completly different angles. You will notice that the weather is completly different as well. Surprisingly I took both pitures on the same day, on March 7th. I shot the picture on the left early in the morning an the picture on the right in the afternoon. You may have noticed the yellow appartement complex on the right image. This is where I live today and from where the picture on left has been taken.
The next two pictures show the almost completed installations. The picture on the left comes from the first floor, the picture on the right shows the tubes of the ventilation on the second floor.
The following two pictures show the kitchen/living room on the second floor. The picture on the right shows the big window to the balcony.
The picture above left is from the third floor, this will be the bath in some month. The picture above right shows a brick saw in the future living room of the ground floor.
The picture above left shows a bricked door in the childs room on the second floor. The pictures above in the middle and on the right show a new wall breakthrough for the door to the same childs room. Once from the inner and once from the outer side.
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My first phot set of that morning covers the assignment very concretely. I captured many different arcades in the alleys of Berne, they are very characteristic for the old city. I always tried to have some people walking through the arcades to vitalize the scenes. But one should not recognize people because they are not the subject and because of privacy. Most images were shot without tripod, but sometimes I needed it because of low light or because I wanted a longer exposure to blur people in motion. All four shots below are shot with the Zuiko 12-60/f2.8-4 lens between 17 and 27mm. Because of the great structures and the way the light falls into the arcades a black and white conversion was appealing to me.
My second photo set was not planned. While walking through the alleys I came to a shop where you can buy old unusual things like metal pockets, headphones, binoculars and more. More fascinating to me were the old somehow trashy dummies standing just aside the shop entry, already in the alley. I took my Zuiko 50mm/f2 and made some portraits. The result is pure kitsch. According to some feedback on Flickr the first one is Pat Cleveland from Adel Rootsteins "Pat & Pretty" and the second Sayoko, from Adel Rootstein as well. The third one is still unknown to me.
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