Coming back.

It's been months since I last updated this blog.

It's hard to believe how much stuff went on in my life in the meantime. I guess one can say I was busy living, at least busy trying to make sense of it all. All this while, I had a blog post in the back of my mind. "Once I finish with this, I will sit my ass down and finally submit the post" - I said countless times. The thing is that as soon as this was finished, another this appeared (that?) and took its place. So the months went by. I fell in love, I moved to a new apartment, I got my heart broken, I graduated, I started my new 'job', I went back home to visit family, I got my first official paper rejection, Which was counteracted by some other good feedback, I kinda fell in love again, etc. And all the while, the post was there. Half done, waiting for me to just finish it.
Post #5. Post #5 was started at least 5 times, never finished. I wanted to talk about what you show. Editing your stuff. Curating if you will.

When you come back from a 'photo journey' (an official shoot, holidays, or just a day in the park), and want to share it (be it with friends or clients) you tend to try and cram as many pics as possible. I say you because that's what instinctively happens to me, and what I tend to see from fellow photographers I follow. This is a huge, negative, vice.

Less is more. Yeah, I know I know... But it IS true.

Nothing screams 'amateur' as a photo album consisting of 120 pics full of repeated sceneries and subjects. Sometimes these have 10 absolutely brilliant pictures, but they are diluted by the other 110. I don't want to see the sequence of events leading to the awesome picture. I just want to see the picture. Isolated. As a work of art by itself. Leave me with the mystery surrounding it. Give me an album of 10 good pictures and I'll think you are an artist. Give me those same 10 pics mixed together with 110 other 'meh' images, and I'll think you just get lucky once in a while. UNless you are Henry Cartier Bresson, in which case I will pay good money to buy your 'scrapbook' and get a sense of the way you choose the frames, how you crop them and the incredible buildups to those famous images. But I digress...

I had a full post written about the subject. Full of examples of good pictures of mine and the frames surrounding them. But life got in the way and after a month or two of no photography, I came back looking for other things. Back to the basics, to use a bit of an overused phrase. I started this blog for myself, to get to know what makes some images special, and then I went on technical tangents. I missed the point of it all. Fuck technicality.

The reason one must learn as much as he can is to be able to forget it. And so I tried to forget.

I was back 'home' for two weeks. That place I called home for 26 years and now feels so alien and crazy to me. I was back in the winter of Buenos Aires, constantly under the rain, alone with my camera and my music. And I shot without thinking. I forgot about the rule of thirds. I forgot about focus (focus is overrated, btw) and I forgot about trying to create beautiful images.

I mean, how could I? I felt like a time traveller, visiting his past. The city had not changed. My friends had not changed. Me? I'm an entirely different Me than what I was 2 years ago, when I left.

Filled inside with conflicting feelings of nostalgia, pity, joy and sadness. Not knowing if I should feel sorry or jealous for the ones I left behind. There they are, living a perfectly normal life, fulfilling all their expectations but not knowing there is a world outside. Ready to hurt you, yes. But ready to open your eyes to everything.

This has gone clearly off topic, and I'm not trying to say that staying is stagnating and leaving is growing. You can grow even if you stay and you can stagnate even if you leave. The trick is realizing it, and not letting life walk all over you. At least not without a fight.
And my fight right now is photography. Trying to grow from a dude who likes to take pictures into a photographer. My pictures of the holiday are dark and cold because my mood was like that. Plus, with Takahiro Kido constantly on my iPod (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKGfbaGxLY ; http://www.myspace.com/takahirokido) it's a bit difficult to get over the gloominess. So I went for it and embraced the sadness, the alienation and -most of all- the rain.

I took pictures that look like I felt. I did not make them that way, that is -I think- what I'm trying to get across. Forget everything and you'll shoot what you feel. And if you don't like what you see, then look deep inside you and ask yourself why.