Two Evenings at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery

I’m currently back at home, for logistical and work-related reasons. I could not get a lot of photography done in the last week, but yesterday I met up with some friends to take a stroll through the Ohlsdorf cemetery.

For those of you who are not familiar, I am fortunate enough to have the world’s largest park cemetery essentially at my doorstep. Let’s go explore it!

If you like, you can hop straight to the photos.

This might be the best image I have taken so far.

Reflections & Notes

Incidentally, this is the second time I have now been there with my camera. The first time was around was immediately after I first got it – the cemetery happens to be on my way to work, so I took my camera and stopped by there in the evening to mess around with the camera and take some nice pictures. In that way, this was a great opportunity to try and measure my progress as a photographer.

Unfortunately, I have already experienced my first instance of data loss here! I could not find the first batch of images on either of my SD cards or on the backups that I (of course!) now have. These images were taken even before I started to catalogue and back up my images, and they must have gotten lost. To be fair, it’s not a big loss: I made a lot of beginner’s mistakes and the quality of 80% of the images was not great. I did want to use them to showcase my progress, but now you’ll have to take my word for it that they were not all that impressive. I have since learned several things.

1. That day was immensely cloudy, and I did not understand lighting all that well yet, and so most of them have extremely blown out skies or just don’t look all that interesting.
2. I was experimenting with long exposure without owning a tripod yet, which led to me having a vast collection of blurry 1/15s shots of bicyclists and cars. I now own a tripod.
3. Instead of taking half a dozen to a dozen shots of any object from different angles and experimenting with different compositions, I only took one or two shots of my subjects. This led to a broadly subpar quality of shots.

TIP: Always expose for the highlights. You can recover an astonishing amount of data from shadows, but if you overexpose (clip on any color channel) data gets lost. For my music friends out there, this is the same logic that applies to audio recording as well: When you clip, you lose information. You can always turn up the gain in post, but you cannot recover clipped audio.

This time, I experimented more with lighting and tried to capture subjects from more interesting angles. I believe the shots are already more creative and have more depth than what I produced previously. I’m not saying they’re “good” – whatever that means in art anyway – but I’d say they’re at least better.

The Photos

The Ohlsdorf cemetery has a total of 14 chapels, all architecturally unique

It also has some very fancy and unique graves. This is not close to the fanciest, but I liked the design.

Another instance of the incredible architecture found there.

Of course, a massive Jesus statue can also be found.

On a personal note

As I mentioned earlier, the Ohlsdorf cemetery is the biggest park cemetery in the world. And with all the beautiful things you can find there, it is sometimes easy to put the emphasis on “park” rather than on “cemetery”. Sometimes I have to remind myself of the tens of thousands of people that are buried there, and all their stories, their families and loved ones.

German for 'thoughts of you'.

Ohlsdorf is full of countless stories – some happy, some sad, some of which ended well before their time. I feel that it is a very humbling and deeply personal exercise to try and really think about those stories when passing by the graves.

I do have a friend that is buried there as well. And every time I go, I am pleasantly surprised by how is grave is still well-maintained. I tried capturing just how nice it still looks.

You are still loved, Hunny.

There is also a Chester Bennington memorial bench that I stumble upon every once in a while. I hadn’t remembered where exactly it was, but fortunately stumbled upon it yesterday.

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The bench is entirely maintained by fans, and people still seem to be bringing flowers 🥲 – 1/2

Well folks, that’s it for me. Not leaving on the happiest note, but then this is a post about a cemetery. Thanks for being here, and as always, you can join the newsletter if you’d like to be notified whenever there is a new post.