FIRST RAMBLINGS.

How does one start a blog?

It's funny cause when you come across with an established one online, you see the accumulated effort of lots of days thinking and writing. You see a developed project that probably went through a great number of gradual changes. No one ever follows a blog with one post.

The bad news is that to start a new blog, you just need to start. By yourself. Slowly moving towards an idea you may or may not have in your head. So this is it. The necessary first post.

Why even bother with introductions?... no one is watching anyway and the essence of what this blog will be is most probably nowhere near what I'm envisioning at the moment. Things develop at their own pace, often surprisingly. So why even try to interfere with that?

This blog is what it is. It will be what it will, rather.

So there. An introduction paragraph on why I don't want an introduction paragraph.

I want to show pictures.

I want to write about those pictures.

Photography is a completely subjective thing (like all art is); what one guy loves another one loathes, and there is no way around that. Of course there are levels of "mainstreamness" to some images: much in the same way that "hey jude" is a universally loved song (who can possibly not like it?) whilst "Rocky Raccoon" may have a fair amount of detractors. Photography too has its share of "hey judes"; those images that are aesthetically pleasing, have a nice subject matter and are just plain 'nice'.

This blog is not for these pictures.

As a photographer I am not particularly any good, I just know what kind of things interest me and I just take a large amount of pictures. Chances are that no matter how much you suck as a photographer, if you take 1000 pictures you'll get lucky at least once and produce a good image.

I think it was Ansel Adams who said that what separates great photographers from mediocre ones is that great photographers get lucky more often.

If you know yourself, and know your style (because you HAVE a style... just look at your collection of pictures hard enough and you'll see a pattern emerge. Photography is curiosity and each one of us is naturally attracted to something.) then you can work on getting lucky more often. But that's a topic for a different discussion...

Back to the topic of "universally great" pictures. I'm possibly one of the worst landscape photographers ever. I love admiring a good A. Adams shot as much as the next guy. I know how he did it, I know the theory, which lenses to use and how to compose. But I cannot possibly take a pleasant landscape shot. I just can't.

There's tons of things I suck at, and you'll see me try every once in a while to get a nice "cool" picture... but I know better and generally stick with what I do best.

So far I said what kind of pictures do not fit with this blog. I'm now getting to the point of explaining what will this shit be actually good for.

Another one of my (apparently infinite) photographic problems lies in my editing. Not the actual editing of the pictures but on the picking of images. Say you take 100 pictures and need to choose 10. The 10 images I choose are very often completely different from what "the people" usually like. Countless times I have proudly shown photographs to friends (real life or even virtual internet ones) only to be greeted with a 'meh' or just general indifference to what I think are genious images.

Of course -and you probably expect this- when I reluctantly show work I'm less proud of (too cliché, too unoriginal, just plain bad) I usually get really positive reactions.

What's wrong with me? why do people like my crappy standard pictures and hate the ones I like?

Should I like the pics I don't like and scrap the ones I like? or are 'they' mistaken?

This is the reason of this blog.

I'm posting the pictures [apparently] only I like and dissecting them.

I want to show (find) What makes me connect with them.

As I said before, I have no clue where this is going. Will it be a one-time thing or will I (finally) be able to maintain a long term artistic project. Big words, I know. I don't think of myself as an artist. I don't even think of myself as a photographer either. I'm just a dude who just happens to have a camera handy most of the time. The rest is just the statistics of large numbers.

Take the first picture I posted. You'll see it if you scroll down. I like it quite a lot.

Where is that? When? Who's the kid? is he by himself or with the older guy?

We don't know. There's just a kid there, dead-center in the image (!) and a guy with his head chopped of moving away from the frame.

It could be anywhere, it could be anytime. I relate to the picture BECAUSE of all the unknowns, not in spite of.

As a portrait, the picture fails miserably. Technically... It's not much better. What's with all the diagonals? why is the focus on the foreground? Even the metering seems off.

And still, it's probably one of my favorite pictures of the weekend.

When you take out all the things you expect from a picture. When you don't have a clear location, time or even subject. Then the picture becomes an object in itself.

If the kid would have been in focus.. then it is a picture of THAT kid. If you knew the kid was in Luxembourg with his family and that the guy in black is just a random guy walking through the frame... then the picture looses its magic. And without magic all you got is a technically deficient picture of some kid and a random guy in the center of Luxembourg.

I connect to this image because I can fill in a multitude of blanks. I can even be the kid. Or the random dude. Where are they going? are they together? what just happened? why does the kid look kinda scared of the guy. Like following him from a prudent distance. What are those papers? Which year is this?

I connect because even if I know most of these answers, even if I was there taking the picture, I can look at it with fresh eyes. There's nothing in the picture that takes me to any preconceived state or mind or emotion. It is just abstract. Pretty diagonals that intersect and form an image I find pleasing.

Do I think of all this when taking pictures? Nope. Not at all. This picture is but a lucky coincidence. The only merit I have is to have given the picture a chance and not deleted it at once as I'm sure any sane human would have.

Then again, I may be wrong, the picture may just suck and it may have deserved to be erased :)