Home

Welcome, my name is Hans Otten, born in Weesp near Amsterdam, now living in the south of the Netherlands with Sophie Chermin.

Sites with remains of  classical antiquity times have always fascinated me. These sites, often quiet, in remote locations, or excavated in  large modern cities or the stunning remains displayed in museums are the link between us and people from long gone, people that lived and thrived then and there and left their marks in history.

These pages span forty years of traveling to visit sites from antiquity  and taking photographs. It started in 1975 with a trip to the south of France, where I saw Roman ruins in Nimes, Arles (revisited in 2017) and La Turbie.
Traveling continued in the next years to Italy (many times revisited since!) , Greece and  Egypt and Asia, middle and far east.
After a short break  to raise the kids! I continued my travels to the south of Europe and a bit further away (China, Japan, Indonesia) from 2007 and now travel with Sophie Chermin since 2011.

Pick a location from the map below! Or choose a site from the two Sitemaps menu entries in the menu on the top.

Loading map...

Loading

Roman Museum Greek Neolithic
Buddhist Hindu Chinese Egypt > Etruskian

I hope you enjoy my and Sophie’s photographs of the sites and little artefacts like tickets and postcards and leaflets, and some stories, mostly stolen from wikipedia. Note that most of the photos come from my larger collection of travel photography: http://reizen.hansotten.nl. There all locations we visit on our trips are documented.

This site also show the progress in equipment.
From 1975 to around 2000 I used analogue camera’s, especially the Praktika XL SLR with lenses wide 29mm, normal 50 mm and telelens 125mm. I made slides, mostly on Agfa material. Digitized in the years 2000-2012.
In 2002 a Casio QV4000 was bought, and for my travel to China in 2007 a Canon Powershot A710IS.
In 2009 a Canon S90 took the main place, I still have and use regularly that little perfect camera!
2010 saw the arrival of a Canon 1000D DSLR with standard and 250mm zoom, 2012 the Canon G1 X. A Canon 1200D DSL was added in 2013 with 18-133 mm zoom, and Sophie used a Canon Powershot S95.
In 2016 my collection of Canon lenses was put to good usage with the semi professional Canon 70D DSLR and a Canon 100D DSLR  with 18-55 mm for Sophie.

A list of years and destinations:

This site started life in October 2015 and was feature complete with 300 pages in March 2016. Last update December 2022, see the blog for recent additions.

License: Hans Otten, Sophie Chermin, 2015-2019 (C) Creative Commons Non-commercial – With Attribution