A LOVE LETTER to Amsterdam
A Groovy Tribute to Amsterdam
An ode to the city through timelapse
This 55M American is soon leaving Amsterdam after seven unforgettable years. To have made Amsterdam my home, three decades after a 1989 spring visit here on a Eurail pass, messes with my mind as much as the space cake I swallowed back then at the long lost Wish You Were Here Coffeeshop — a moist thick slice of chocolate birthday cake, if memory serves.
Seven winters spent at 52 degrees latitude North feels significant, but it’s nothing in a place with so much history. It’s wild that our years here represent barely 5% of our house’s 120-year history — merely a blip and hardly more material than any of the reported 12,000 to 15,000 bikes that get unceremoniously flung into the Amsterdam canals every year.
I digress. I’m here to offer a humble digital token of my appreciation as a parting gift to this majestic city. Choose HD. Sound on.
For the truly curious, a very long backstory...
These three minutes and forty-seven seconds are the culmination of multiple components connecting together.
It started during the pandemic.
Friday, April 3, 2020, was one of the first days of hard-earned signs of Spring. Amsterdam had finally relented to pressure in the hospitals, and in the preceding days announced its first hard measures, announcing that (“starting tomorrow”) all but the city’s essential services would close. Within an hour, hundreds formed long queues in front of every coffeeshop in town, with desperate locals topping up their stash for the lockdown.
In the subsequent days the government pragmatically changed their tune, and designated said coffeeshops as “essential services”, reopening them for business, much to the relief of a whole lot of Dutch nationals who love to maintain that weed is “only for teenagers and tourists.”
Classic pragmatic Dutch government Covid-19 responses of that time also included recommending everyone find a “seksbuddy” (they were ahead of the curve on prioritizing mental health), and encouraging sex workers to exercise caution when returning to work by engaging only in recommended positions.
On one of the first full days of hard “shelter in place,” I grabbed my Canon G7X point-and-shoot and spent the afternoon going holoholo, racing around Amsterdam’s central canal district by foot, attempting to capture the surreal moment and ghost town Amsterdam had become.
Sure, the iMovie production value and shaky camera is hardly more professional than my typical DadVid, but this felt, dare I admit, artistic? I liked the feeling of capturing a fleeing moment that would likely never return. I felt like a historian.
The second experience happened just a few months later when my teenage boys and I snuck in an 8-day hut-to-hut trek through Italy’s Dolomites the first week of August that same year. I brought along my trusty Canon, and had fun each day experimenting with its timelapse settings, trying to do the stunning terrain a modicum of justice. I felt encouraged by a couple of lucky results, and became convicted to do more.
But then, in late December 2021, I had a series of disappointing shoots over my Mom’s 80th birthday celebration and a run of botched timelapse efforts and blown opportunities in one of the most scenic settings imaginable. The final insult was missing a majestic glowing pink 3% waxing crescent moon fall gracefully into the Pacific over the black lava landscape and the Kona International Airport runways below.
I needed to up my game.
With a New Year’s resolution to do so, I adopted my deceased father-in-law’s photography backpack and plunged in. DSLR, lenses, filters, batteries. Then came the tripod, intervalometer, memory cards, hard drives, software licenses (shout out LRTimelapse), plug-ins, and hours of hours of YouTube learning from timelapse masters like Gunther Wegner and Emeric Le Bars. It was a slippery slope, and I slipped all in.
Two weeks later, I captured my very first sequence standing with damp shoes on the wet grass on Museumplein during happy hour on a Friday afternoon. Cringeworthy quality. I was totally hooked.
My ultimate objective was to learn how to capture a decent light-to-dark timelape sequence utilizing the so-called “holy grail” method — which involves manually changing camera settings as you go, and smoothing the jerky adjustments later in post-production. Specifically, I dreamed of capturing a full moon rise over the Rijksmusuem during golden hour.
What hadn’t yet occurred to me was how few chances I would have to shoot that full moon. I hadn’t yet considered you get two maybe three shots a month at best. And because the moon shifts each month, the angle of the shot I wanted over the museum is really only possible during January or February when the winter skies are rarely clear.
January’s cycle was a wash out. No moon sightings. February’s cycle offered only a quick peek on the third night, so on February 17, I perched discreetly on the wet and slippery terrace just off the bar at the Apollo Hotel which afforded an angle down the Amstelkanaal as the moon was scheduled to rise over the Hotel Okura.
The bar filled up as I nervously fiddled with my set up outside alone on the canalside deck. Twenty minutes in, a young local gangster popped out for a smoke and, Dutch style without pretense, informed me that he and his friends inside thought it was weird I was just standing there and wanted to know what I was up to. It seemed this was their turf. After I waxed on about timelapse, he figured it was probably alright since I really wasn’t bugging anyone. Doe normaal and all. He bought me an Affligem blonde (“anything but Heineken”), and then asked where on Insta he could see how my video turned out. By the time he’d come back for his next smoke, grooverdam was born. He was my first follower.
It is shaky, over exposed, and out of focus. Sorry, not sorry. It was my best result yet.
But getting a clear sky on the right day with no competing work, family, or social commitments was proving to be difficult. I needed more reps. I studied mooncalc.org and made assumptions about building heights and elevation angles, and hunted for interesting spots to shoot from. I studied various weather forecast apps for cloud cover predictions.
I remembered the formative crescent moon I’d seen on the Big Island, and I calculated there was a one or two day window to catch a setting waxing crescent moon just after the sun went down if the skies were clear enough.
So on March 4, eight nights after Putin invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine, and an hour after capping one of the highest stakes professional weeks of my life, I let myself onto the 8th and top floor of the circular parking garage behind the RAI. I aimed down the gunbarrel of rush hour traffic as cars and trains that snaked down the A10 through the Zuidas corridor, and spent two hours takin a 30MB photo every 9.5 seconds 796 times in row.
Over a two hour and six minute sequence, I made 33 manual camera adjustments — first gradually raising the shutter speed from 1/60 a full 5 seconds, and then taking the ISO from 100 to 640 aiming to keep the light meter centered on the display. It was over exposed, but I was just concentrating on following my YouTube instructions, praying I wouldn’t get the yips and bump the camera when twisting the dials. I was jittery for sure.
I’ll never forget it. Fully present. Totally in the moment. Concentrating on my task. Ignoring my phone. Mind clear of the week’s stress. Taking in the evening. Not a soul in sight. Bluetooth speaker jamming to the grooverdam Spotify playlist. Me wondering who’s watching me on cctv, curious if I’ll get a visit from the politie asking me what I was smoking. I didn’t.
While I’m shooting, like a lightning bolt, Spotify’s prescient algorithm chose “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and piped it out through my bluetooth speaker. Not the funky Phish “2001” cover from the 2011 Berkeley run at the Greek. The funkier Brazilian Deodato 1973 version that came out a few years after Kubrick’s made the Strauss’s motif from 1896 famous in his 1968 epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like the protagonist in John Irvine’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, I knew I was meant to try making this:
From here, it was a only a very small leap to conclude that grooverdam’s raison d’etre was to pair groovy tunes with timelapse vignettes of this endlessly photogenic cityscape.
So, that’s what I did for about a year and a half. I must have shot over 120 sequences, and I learned as I went.
The production of a timelapse video reminds me a lot of homebrewing, which I got into in my 20’s during the early ’90s. In those days, I brewed probably a total of 30 five-gallon (19 liter) batches, adding gear, different ingredients (hops, yeasts, barleys), and new techniques with every two-week brewing, fermentation, and bottling sequence. Brewing beer and making timelapse photography are similar in that both are a multi-stage process with an uncertain output which you never know how it will turn out until it’s too late. Each time you’re experimenting with something new (lighting, gear, setting), and usually never in isolation. Part art, part science, with a whole lot of luck — sampling the final product, making tweaks, trying to figure out what caused what, and then reverse engineering all of the mistakes to try to fix for next time.
Over many repetitions, I gradually crawled up the timelapse learning curve mostly thanks to studying videos from Emeric and some timely tech support from Gunther. Better gear and premium software also helped.
In all, I posted 70 reels over these months to my 170 Instagram followers. I lured this throng one at time. Almost guaranteed, whenever I’m out shooting, an inevitable stranger will roll by and reveal a whiff of curiosity about what I’m up to. That’s when I go in for the kill, and pad my follower count. Also, the merch helps.
Some of my reels are objectively worse than others. My favorites are featured on my profile grid with some hidden gems buried somewhere deeper.
But, a reel without music isn’t a really a reel at all.
Let’s talk about music for a minute.
Amsterdam has a beautifully eclectic live music scene. Because it’s Amsterdam, we are included on almost every band’s European tour. We’re lucky because almost everyone wants to come play here. Exhibit A: the Grateful Dead on their famous Europe 1972 tour.
But now that the Concertgebouw is off the table, the bigger shows are held out near the Arena (20 mins by train) where there are three options with capacities ranging from 6,000 (AFAS Live) to 17,000 (Ziggo Dome) to 55,000 (Johan Cruyff Stadium). I’ve seen some great shows out at those venues including the likes of Roger Waters, U2, Pearl Jam, The War on Drugs, Imagine Dragons, Tedeschi Trucks, and Khruangbin now that they have blown up so huge. But these venues lack character and soul.
Instead, I prefer to see shows in town, especially at the famous Paradiso (capacity 1,500) which used to be a church (and effectively still is for the live music flock). I love the intimacy the compact space with its two levels of balconies, and especially the 8-minute bike ride from my place through the vondelpark to the underground parking garage across the street from the venue. Weeknight showtime at 8:30? I‘m typically reading in bed by 10:45, fifteen minutes after the encore.
Amsterdam is the hometown for a few great bands, too. The prescient Spotify algorithm pegged me a couple years back and turned me on to a sitar-infused Japanese psychedelic rock band whose home base is Amsterdam named Kikagaku Moyo.
So, two months later when I finally captured a decent sequence of the Hotel Okura, it was another moment when I didn’t have to choose a song for the reel, because the song chose me: “Nobakitani.” The pairing together of both Japanese infused Amsterdam icons, I hope, is fitting to both.
Seeing the effortlessly cool Kikagaku Moyo in Amsterdam (Paradiso) with my son and his pal Tommy visiting from L.A. was topped only by seeing them again several months later in Los Angeles (Wiltern), also with my son and his pals just before the band went on indefinite hiatus (I refuse to concede they’ve broken up).
But Kikagaku Moyo isn’t the only Amsterdam band I fell for.
For some time, I’d seen Altīn Gün’s name mentioned as another hot Amsterdam band, sometimes even spotted in coverage of Relix which I read to stay current on the rock music scene. They are coined as Turkish psychedelic rock, but the truth is more nuanced. They formed when Dutch bass player and vinyl connoisseur Jasper Verhulst, who fell in love with Anatolian rock, put out a call to find others to join and form a band recording new spins on traditional folk songs from Turkey. They’re a ton of fun, eclectic sounds (psych, disco, funk), great hooks, and a contagiously happy vibe.
My wingman Peter and I saw them play three songs at the Paradiso in February 2023 when they headlined a fundraiser for earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria, previewing a few songs from their forthcoming album named Ašk. We were hooked, and went to the first of their two-show album release party just a few weeks later on March 30. The sold-out show with the hometown crowd was electric. The next night, after dinner, I snagged a last minute ticket on TicketSwap, hopped on my bike, and saw the second night, too.
I dreamed of building a collection of timelapses that showcased Amsterdam in its finest moments, honoring both iconic spots and those only recognizable by locals.
“Maybe I could string them together into a love letter to Amsterdam?” I wondered. But then, the YouTube algorithm delivered me Albert Dros’s stunning and epic video. It took my breath away. And also my ambition — successfully snuffing out dreams of doing something similar. It is so so so good. If you love Amsterdam, you’ll love this.
After seeing Albert’s cinematic video, I felt stuck for a minute. Sure, I was happy with my eclectic reel collection, but was left feeling wanting. I craved some sort of capstone, as I felt this chapter was ready to come to a close — both living in Amsterdam, and also the desire to move on from my obsession of capturing this city. I wanted to assemble something comprehensive while trying out some newly developed techniques on some of my older sequences. By then, I’d learned how to clean up some of my sloppiest mistakes. Thank you, Emeric.
When Altīn Gün announced their 2023 West Coast tour, I immediately bought tickets for the Belasco show in Los Angeles coming up on November 9th. I was never really planning on actually flying there for the show, but bought four tickets anyway for my son and his friends in Westwood. If you can catch this tour, you should check it out.
It didn’t take fancy math for Spotify to decide to keep serving me up songs from the new album. So when Altīn Gün’s cover of traditional “Rakıya Su Katamam” hit me at the exact perfect moment, I knew once again, exactly what I was meant to do.
The end.
