How can you capture the wind on a photograph? How can you make the viewer feel the cold or the warmth of a place? How can you make landscape photography communicate the sense of a place? Can a photo be a substitute for the simple, raw emotions that one feels when he’s out in the woods or in the mountains?
These are the things that lately have been on my mind. I’m pretty sure it all started with something that Andrew Molitor wrote on his brilliant blog. He keeps bashing on these points but right now I will not search those two or three relevant posts but here’s the gist of it (or more correctly, my interpretation):
more ...Wedding photography is something like newborn photography; cheesy, kitsch and very very false. Obviously I’m talking about the kind of wedding and newborn photography which is most in vogue nowadays (i.e., the first hits you get when googling these keywords).
I just happened to read Milnor’s blog that featured an interview with some wedding photographer I didn’t know — and i still don’t know — but what was interesting was the little background story Milnor wrote so I thought about something:
more ...
Forget what I said in previous posts. I may still have some sympathies for Laroque and Simpson and Johnston but I have reached a place where there are no more photographic heroes for me on the web.
Unless you count Andrew Molitor, of course1.
There are so many wonderful ideas on his blog, and once you start reading you realize what’s missing from the internet these days; the excitement that I still remember from the days when the web was young, when you could discover brilliance without the taint of money-making.
more ...Yesterday I started to write a little background story to introduce a post on how I use Python and how fun and creative that is. However, the “little background story” started to grow and became something else entirely, so I decided to cut off the science part and leave it …
more ...Since I picked up Python a couple of years ago I have enjoyed my everyday job more and more. It’s like being thrown back to my 12-year old self playing with a ZX Spectrum or Commodore-128, when all I wanted was to create videogames or do some other stuff1; only back then I didn’t have the perseverance and the excuses that I have now.
“Excuses” is a fine word for what I do; I am assigned a task (or sometimes I go looking for one), and I see this task only as an excuse to solve the problem in a way that I see fit. So if there’s even a hint of repetition I will go and write a for-loop to do that. If I need to use a dumb-ass software that I don’t like I will write the dumb-ass piece of code myself2. Etc.
more ...I wanted to get a Leica this time. For real.
You know Leica: stupidly expensive cameras that are more likely to be kept in a closet or worn like a piece of jewellery than actually used (it wasn’t like that before, when actual journalists back in the fifties used it as a fast, robust little camera to be used in the field).
Anyway, even if now they seem to be more of a fashion statement, I have always liked the impression of solidity, their simplicity, and that funky way of setting the focus1. But I would have never considered one for real if I had not played with the original Monochrom; that really changed something, the simple pleasure of using and holding this rather large, deceiptively simple and “dense” camera changed somehow my perception of Leicas. I will be honest and declare it right now that none of this matters when it comes to photography; but I’m talking about something else here, I’m talking about very elementary pleasures that are tangentially related to the actual making of photographs; the same pleasure that I get from using bycicles or a Faber-Castell pencil for example.
more ...Warning: this is serious nerdy stuff. Not for the faint of heart. Carry on reading if:
- you know what Python is
- you have a blog, but not the easy kind like Tumblr or Blogger, something that allows you to write in HTML (or Markdown), e.g. Pelican or Jekyll
- you have a Flickr account and want to post links to photos or albums in said blog
Since I last wrote about (stolen) bikes my friend Phil (from T-P 2010) convinced me to get a bike which I would have never thought of buying; a short-travel, full-suspension Norco with 29” wheels. The price was very reasonable too, which I think was essential for my decision.
more ...Well it seems I have successfully ported my blog to Pelican. After hacking my way through jekyll to make the site look like I wanted it to look, I had the irresistible urge to try out Pelican.
And I liked it so much it seemed logical to spend a few …
more ...