There are still pearls to be found on the internet, after all.
In these days I have found three photography blogs which are full of interesting and well written articles; stimulating, instructive, much better of the crap that Popular Photography publishes (and I’m not even mentioning the countless websites and blogs of pixel-peepers and technology feticists).
Worth bookmarking them for when you have time to sit down and read something that will help renew your passion for this art:
http://www.ultrasomething.com/photography
http://www.laroquephoto.com/blog
Some of the favourite articles that I have read so far:
-
http://www.ultrasomething.com/photography/2012/06/hatch-battening: I was one of the guys throwing shit at Leica for their Monochrom camera, sold at an outrageous price. I am still strongly opposed in principle to Leicas and in particular to this model on the basis of pricing alone, because I think it’s strongly driven by brand and marketing more than technology, but at least now I understand there may something more behind.
-
http://www.ultrasomething.com/photography/2011/12/black-and-white-colors: a little story of how to assign a task to yourself to overcome conventional approaches and get an alternative view of reality. It also transforms into a story of how little day-to-day creativity will not pay you off in material terms but will give you something much more important in the long term (sense of accomplishment, etc.).
-
http://blog.mingthein.com/2012/07/21/street-photography-ethics: this guy is not a poet like Egor but knows a thing or two about technique, plus I dig his street shoots. He’s a hyper-nerd anyway, just look at his camerapedia.
-
http://www.ultrasomething.com/photography/2012/02/gear-guano-canal: another very well written tale on how photographers (or maybe I should say “men”) are primarily brainless gadget-freak addicts.
-
http://blog.leica-camera.com/photographers/blog-contributors/egor/fegor-shooting-through-the-wormhole: unexpected praise of pinhole photography — again this is to me a piece full of stimulating thoughts, not because I have any interest in pinhole photography per se but as an excuse for exploring new ideas and new point of views; the message that I got from this is “get rid of the excess baggage that is the technical excellence, the supersharp definition of an 85mm f/1.4, the extreme detail that a Nikon D800 may give you, and try to find a certain meaning in your pictures, whatever that might be”.
-
http://www.laroquephoto.com/blog/2012/7/19/seeing-mono.html: it may seem just a little description on how to get some good black and whites, but at the beginning of it a very important point is stated, that all the images that we see on this blog (and, one assumes, also on all the other websites of photographers who know something) are processed and nothing that arrives to the public is ever, truly OOC (straight out of camera): “Processing images is as old as photography itself”.