As you may or may not know, I live close to Rotterdam, an industrial city with interesting architecture and an active government. Apparently this year it is 75 years ago that the city started rebuilding itself after demolishing from the war, and the city decided it was a good reason for celebration. One of the activities is a temporarily built staircase to the roof of the Groot Handelsgebouw (trade center) next to the Central Station. As you can see in the photo above, the staircase indeed is temporary, built with scaffolding and hard board. But I think it looks very cool none the less! I climbed the stairs a couple of weeks ago, armed with three cameras: my digital Leica M240, my M2 film camera loaded with Portra 400, and my newly acquired sweet little Rollei 35 S loaded with Tri-X. So I hope you’ll forgive me for the overload of photos…

When climbing the stairs one of the first things you get to see is the top of the central station. Somehow I just couldn’t get enough of the pyramid-shaped lights on top of it. I sometimes feel awkward repeating myself with similar images, but I decided that when I call it inspiration it’s OK 🙂 .

When on top of the building, of course you get to see several views across Rotterdam. My favourite is the one with in the (faint) distance the famous Erasmus bridge, also called The Swan (the small white peak). I was curious about the results with the Rollei as this was the first test. Seems to working ok, although you can clearly see that this small point and shoot lens is not as sharp as the (equally vintage) Leica lens.

What I didn’t expect was how beautiful the Groot Handelshuis looked. I never really paid a lot of attention to this building, but walking on the roof terrace gave me an unexpected view of it. So again, lot’s of images with all three cameras of the cool repetitive structures.

For this occasion they also created a cafe inside, which looked really cool with the mirrored ceiling.

M240 with Summicron 1:2.0/35mm

M240 with Summicron 1:2.0/35mm

I couldn’t resist taking a selfie in the ceiling. But with my 35mm lens I had to crop quite a bit, for forgive me the rather un-sharp result…

On my way back I took some photos of the Central Station:

I really enjoyed the view of the city and the building. This weekend was supposed to be the last weekend for visiting De Trap, but they postponed the closing date due to the success. That doesn’t surprise me, it just looks cool and is a fun way to spend an hour or so. Finishing off with two different views of the staircase itself:

Thanks for reading!