It was a fascinating experience, both from personal and photographic perspectives.
But since this is a "photography" blog, I'll concentrate on the pictures and spare you from reading about my life :)
It's been a while since I spent some days completely disconnected from the world (my phone died and I left the computer at home) in a city where I know no one and nothing at all. Just randomly walking around, no schedules, no discussions on what to do or see. Complete freedom!
As for the photography, I think the Antwerp set pretty much qualifies as "weird". Before we get to the pictures, and their style, let me tell you what I did. I took around 400 pictures, all of them with one lens (my favorite, 105mm DC), one aperture setting (f2, wide open) and with the defocusing ring turned all the way up (for the soft focus effect). I did have another lens in the bag just in case, but I wanted to make of this shoot a useful photographic exercise.
Now, I'm an advocate of prime lenses (i.e. no zooms) for a variety of technical and romantic reasons that I will maybe get into one day. Not today though.
Prime lenses are more "uncomfortable" for the photographer. Not having the ability to zoom, you are the one who needs to move. Having just one prime lens limits your perspective a lot.
Which we tend to think it's a bad thing.
The idea of this exercise is to challenge that. Be forced to think of ways to capture the world around you with just that lens. Infuse yourself in that limited perspective so much that you can automatically know how life through that lens looks without actually looking through the viewfinder.
Yes, there is a place for many different lenses in photography. Some pictures scream for a long tele and some just work better with a wide angle, but how do you recognize which lenses to use if you are not able to see "through the lens" in your minds eye? Yes, you can carry a shitload of lenses with you and try the same picture with all of them. But that's not very practical (and you'll probably miss the shot unless you shoot architecture).
I believe that there's a difference between framing and composing. I'm not discovering anything new here, in fact this was recently discussed by ken rockwell (a photographer I don't particularly like, but who is very good at expressing his opinions -whether you agree or not, it's always interesting to read what he has to say-), Thom Hogan (now he, I really like) and countless others. So, bear with me here. If you heard this all before, sorry.
Ok, so framing and composing...
You compose a picture with your mind, you frame one by moving your camera around. Yes, it's a subtle difference (and most of the times you do both at the same time) but it's what separates an ok pic from a great one. Composition takes perspective into account. Composition really takes into account which focal length you are using. It's easy to see what I mean: take a wide angle and a tele (or a big zoom lens) and snap two pictures of the same subject without changing your position.
The change of lens (or focal length) changes EVERYTHING. Unless you know what effect each lens will bring into your composition, you are not composing, just framing to make sure everything fits. That's one of my issue with zooms. They make you lazy, make you zoom instead of moving around. They make you frame instead of compose.
Their sheer versatility complicates the job of learning how the world will look through the lens before putting your eye into the viewfinder.
Finally, Prime lenses are usually better built, lighter, more luminous and all around of a better quality than zooms at comparable prices.
It looks like I did get into all the debate of primes vs. zooms... but now, enough of the technical shit, let's go back to actual photography.
As I said before, you need to know your lenses inside out. You need to know the effect you'll get shooting through them before pressing the shutter. Hell, you need to know that before even taking the lens out of your bag. You need to eliminate the randomness in lens choice.
And the only way to learn that is: practice, practice, practice. So that's what I did, I took one lens and I fixed the "parameters". I snapped 400 pictures with a fixed focal length, a fixed aperture and a soft focus effect. You would probably expect all the pictures to look extremely similar. And in a way they are. All the pics from the set share the same feel, there's something linking them. But no, they do not look similar in composition. And that was my greatest achievement this past weekend. Even though I didn't come back from Antwerp with an amazing set of photographs that work together as a cohesive thing I would be proud to show around, I came back having managed to learn how to use one of my lenses. In one setting. At least that's what I think :)
And that's quite a lot.
Pictures. Let's see pictures!
As usual, my favorite of the set:
Click on the read more thingy for more pics!
There's a lot going on in this pic. What's the subject? the bike? the traffic light? the woman? Why is that woman cut in half? I Don't know. As for the technical details, you can see the effect of using the wide open lens and specially the effect of the defocus control (soft focus) in how all the highlights emit some sort of halo.
I was walking and saw the girl on this picture from 2 blocks away. I was fascinated by that dress. I know I can come off as a bit of a creepy stalker when photographing women, but in this case I think it's justified. I mean... C'mon!! it's just wonderful. Again, note the halo around all the white stuff. Giving the dress an even more dreamlike quality. I don't like the composition in this pic though. I settled for a square crop because there's a distracting dude to the left, off frame. Also, I'd rather have the girl alone... but I didn't have much choice. And I may be a stalker, but waiting for her to be alone, following her and taking her pics... well, that would be a new level of weird. And now, for something completely different:
A cityscape taken with a wide open, soft focus, 105mm lens???
That would have never been my first lens choice, in fact I don't think I would have chosen this lens for this pic if not for the stupid exercise! and yet, I think this pic works perfectly.
Now I know :)
I'll end this extra-long post with some of my favorites from the set. As usual, the whole set is in flickr (click on any of the pics to go there).
(YES!!! in colour!!!)
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