Ólafur Arnalds

I'm bitter today. And freezing cold.
It's -5 degrees outside and I just spent the past 4 hours standing outside, on a train station. I was literally hurting cause of the cold. I'm much better now, I managed to get into a train and am now happily sitting on the floor.
As is normal every time I have to travel back home, snow wreaked havoc on the european transportation system and everything paralyzed. Being a wise man, I planned ahead this year and got a train ticket to Paris one day before my flight. Lucky me, I would have lost the flight otherwise. Still, I don't wanna count my eggs before they hatch. There's so much than can (and probably will) go wrong between now and tomorrow's flight :)
Anyway. this is about photography, so let's get onto that.

The topic at hand today is Ólafur Arnalds.



That's him up there, "Oli" playing his piano. If you are not familiar with his music, I couldn't recommend it enough. Whatever your musical tastes are, I believe no one can fail to appreciate his music. It's not easy to classify him though. He's from Iceland, so he definitely has some of that "icelandic sound" going for him... but you'd be mistaken if you thought he is just another Sigur Ros clone. What he does would be best described as "modern classical" with a touch of electro.
Bottom-line is he produces some of the most beautiful melodies you'll ever hear, using a piano, a quartet of strings and a computer.
With music, it's easier to just listen and form your own opinions though. His myspace is: http://www.myspace.com/olafurarnalds

His concert was absolutely beautiful. Magical. They had spread carpets and pillows over the floor, so everyone could sit comfortably and just enjoy the music.
And enjoy we did!!.

Photographically, though, it was hell for a photographer. On the one hand, you had to deal with the fact that everyone was just lying on the floor, so moving around was not an option. I had to shoot everything from the spot I was sitting in. That was not all! to make it worse, his music is so dynamic, that when it's soft, it's really soft. Soft enough for a camera going off to be a problem. I could only take pictures in the "heavy" parts of the set. The added complication of that being that since the light show was synced to the music, I just got pictures of the "crazier" parts. The mellow parts were awesome too. Believe me :)


Some of the girls from the string quartet.




The rest of the quartet.


I don't think there's much else to say about this concert. Just go and become a fan of his music. It's really worth it.

Oh, yeah. I have a thing with musicians. It's REALLY easy for me to see a girl playing an instrument and not fall for her.
This was not the exception. I fell in love with the cello player at first sight.
Of course, my favorite picture of the set is one of her.
Here it is:


 

Until next time, hopefully from sunny Buenos Aires.

G L O W pt2

So, I promised more G L O W pics on my last post. I'm -as usual- a bit late, but here it finally is; GLOW Pt2. As anyone who has seen my pictures knows, I am:
(a) More interested in shooting people than stuff (shooting in a photographical sense, of course) and,
(b) Super shy. Which kind of goes against (a).

So, events like G L O W, where everyone is carrying a camera around AND is really into the exhibition are a blessing for me. I'm essentially invisible there. I have the freedom to shoot away with nobody really noticing AND because everybody is so busy observing the art, they let their true selves shine trough.
When you want to take a really good picture of someone, just make sure he/she is not thinking about it. Henry Cartier Bresson was a master at that; striking conversations with his sitters for hours until they forgot about it all. He just waited, and then, at the precise instant when the true self of his subject shone through -via a certain sparkle in the eye or a minuscule gesture- click! He got the pic he was waiting for.

I'm not trying to compare myself with HCB, I'm pretty rubbish at portraits still. So I take advantage of these situations where I can still find people in a rather natural habitat of sorts, where I'm just not there.

So, enough with the boring intro. On to some pictures.


I love this one. There's nothing particularly fancy about it but as soon as I saw that wall near the exit of one of the exhibition halls, I knew what to do. I just went out of the way, sat down in the dark and waited for people to pass by.
Then, it was just a matter of timing the shots. I got all sort of variations of this pic: Families together, people opening umbrellas, playing with cameras, tall people, short people... you get the idea. Of course, I'm not showing those alternate shots. I know better :)


The guys overseeing one of the installations. Their stance is more interesting than the actual thing, I guess.

Click the read more thingy for more pics.

GLOW

What is glow you say?
Well... glow is a free, yearly festival organized by the government of Eindhoven. Since Eindhoven is -after all- the city of light, it kinda makes sense for a light-related event (or three) to take place here.
So, in short, GLOW is all about light. How to create art with light.

The thing took place over the course of a week, all over the city. You would find weird sculptures scattered around town, buildings transformed into huge canvasses for artists to show they audiovisual creations and an all around festive mood that could be felt in the air. The damp, freezing air.
The downside to a light festival in the street is that you actually need darkness to appreciate it. And darkness means November. And November -here- means cold and rain. Lots of rain.
To be fair, it didn't rain on sunday... but it did the other 6 days of the festival.

Anyway, I'm not here to complain about the shitty weather (though, for the record, I maintain it did make a difference in the quality of my pictures... I was just to busy freezing, getting wet and trying to keep the camera somewhat dry to actually think about taking nice pics), so without further ado here's some of my favorite shots from GLOW.


Laser bed, Philips light museum.


Totally trippy wall from the Philips museum.
This image is not really "real" though, cause it was just a laser randomly moving around, creating cool designs. The unreal aspect of the image comes from me using a long exposure for the shot, freezing -in a sense- the movement of the light.

Click on the read more link for more "glowy" images.

Another kiss

Don't you worry, I'm not turning into a hopeless romantic only shooting people in love, silently judging their happiness. At least that's what I tell myself :)
But seriously, this is an old picture that I remembered after posting the Stockholm kiss.
You can tell it's an old one cause it's in color, I don't really shoot much color anymore. That, and the fact that it's a wideangle pic. I don't really shoot wideangle anymore. At least not in the street.

So, here's this week's picture:

That's a random street in Strasbourg, France. June 2008 I think.

I usually hate these "fake color" pictures, where you desaturate the image and just leave something in color. It strikes me as fake, and well... just not my cup of tea. But having said that, what I adore about this shot is the splash of color from the red light, specially on the wet street. It's 100% luck and I think it looks wonderful.
No "artificial" post processing was done to the image, that was the way that night particular street looked like that night. Also, that kiss is fantastic. I love how it's pretty hidden in the image, but once you see it, you cannot stop looking at it.

THE KISS

Not much to say here.

This happened somewhere in Stockholm, a couple of weeks ago.

(I wonder if they remember that kiss).

INCUBATE

I love music. I love concerts. I love photography.
So, it shouldn't be much of a surprise to see that I love taking pictures at any gig I go to.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a pretty interesting festival going on near my place: Incubate. It took place all around Tilburg and lasted for a whole week.
The idea behind Incubate was of having all these different artistic endeavors going on simultaneously around town. So, it was not a huge festival where you have one or two stages in a stupidly large park (as most euro festivals are) but the festival itself took place within the city, everything could become a venue; record stores, bars, actual venues and -of course- the street itself.

I regret a bit that I was there for just one saturday. The things I saw and heard were so good that I promised myself I'll go there for the whole duration next year.
So... without further ado, here's some pictures from Incubate 2010.

As for the images, I think they do speak for themselves in the sense that I like to treat my concert photography in the same way I treat all my photography. I'm not there to show you how it was, I'm there to show you how I see it. I usually find concert pics boring because they attempt to show something that cannot be shown.
The visuals of a live show are extremely difficult to capture. Lighting conditions are usually crap (for photography, that is) and in any case, visuals without the music and vibe just don't convey much.
So you can easily end up with sterile shots that are technically good but transmit nothing or with complete nonsense, shots that are out of focus, over exposed and under exposed all at the same time.
My way out of that? Just shoot like crazy. The more shots you get, the bigger the chances you get at least a useable picture. And focus on the details. Shoot whatever it is that sparks your interest. It can be the lead singer, but it can also often be something as simple as the symmetry of a cable running the length of the stage.

EKLIN. http://www.myspace.com/eklin Dutch psychedelic trip-hop. They played in almost total darkness to a backdrop of bizarre public domain dutch footage.

THIS WILL DESTROY YOU. http://www.myspace.com/thiswilldestroyyou

American post-rock. Think Godspeed you! black emperor or mono.

PSYCHOFAGIST.http://www.myspace.com/psychofagist
Craziest shit I've ever seen. Brutal death metal jazz thingy. Like Mr. Bungle, UneXpect and Secret chiefs 3 all rolled into one with the aggression turned up to 11.

Well... That's it for today. See you next time.

TODAY I TOOK A PICTURE OF A FLOWER

Actually, it was not today. I took it yesterday afternoon just before going out to dinner with a few friends. But yesterday I took a picture of a flower doesn't quite have the same ring to it :)

So, here's the picture I took [yesterday]:






















It's just a yellow flower, growing around the corner. It's a pretty wild thing and while it's not particularly beautiful, there's something about it that caught my eye yesterday morning when I first saw it.
Since I had no camera at hand, I made a mental note of its location and returned armed with the camera in the afternoon.
I don't know what attracts me to this flower. I think it's the imperfectness of it. The -let's say- lack of beauty. It's a typical city-flower. More in common with the common weed that grows in the pavement than with the beautiful (and expensive) bouquets we commonly associate flowers with.
I dunno. I was walking by and it was love at first sight. I knew that the flower would make a nice picture.

I think I was right, cause I really like how the pic came out.

Photographically, there's not much I can tell about it. It's pretty standard. I knew I wanted the flower completely centered and wanted it to be the only splash of color in the frame.
I've been trying to use my wide angle lens a lot lately. My theory is that I suck at taking pictures with wide angle lenses, so I should be using them as often as possible :)
I used the 17-35 zoom (yes, I have one zoom lens!!! but I got it for free, it used to belong to a big newspaper and it's had the crap beaten out of it... still works, though).
AND to make it even more interesting, I'm trying to shoot more color pictures. Basically for the same reason. I suck at color.

So, here you go. A color picture of a flower, taken with a wide angle lens! all things I suck at :)

One lens.

 Another weekend, another photo trip. This time I went to Antwerpen (amberes en castellano), Belgium.
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!

LEIDEN

So, I wanna be a photographer.
I mean, seriously. I want to be one.
My first step to achieving that is taking more pictures. It sounds obvious, but it makes sense. Really.

What I mean is not taking more pictures per "session", I do take a lot of pics every time I head outside with my camera. What I mean is that I need to go outside and look for the pictures more often.
It's super easy to take nice pictures when you are out on holidays. The trick is to try and produce a good picture every week. Even in those uneventful weeks where seemingly nothing happens.
It's a bit like writing. It's easy sitting down and retelling a funny story that happened to you. The difficulty comes in writing regularly, even when [apparently] nothing out of the ordinary has happened to you.

So, my new mission: Go look for the pictures, do not wait for them to come.

And so, this past weekend I fought my desire for a relaxing couple of days of music and reading while lying on the couch and took a train to Leiden. A beautiful dutch city that is somehow not as well known as it should. Now, I have to admit that I chose to go there in order to pay a visit to a friend of mine I hadn't seen for a few months. BUT still, the whole idea was to dedicate at least an afternoon to photography.

And so I did.

Actually, I had two "projects" going on at once, in two different compact flash cards (so as to not cross contaminate either of them). It was a bit of a nightmare to switch back and forth between them (AND change the settings in the camera EACH time!) but I think it was worth it. I still haven't transferred the pics from the "secondary" camera but will hopefully do so soon. Soon as in before the weekend.

Ok. So, about the pictures. I don't know if it was my mood or if the people in Leiden were not that interesting, but the majority of the pictures I took were of architectural or just plain abstract nature. Of course, this doesn't mean I didn't get to shoot some people... In fact, my two favorite captures of the weekend relate to old men.
It's also striking that I came back without ANY stalker shot. I remember there being beautiful women there. I wonder why I didn't think of taking their picture.

Anyway. My favorite shot of the weekend:

























One thing I love about the shot is that it's almost symmetric. As I hinted at in the last post (at least by looking at the pictures I showed), I'm getting back into symmetrical framing: -as I put it bluntly- fuck the rule of 3rds.
What I love about this shot is that I framed it perfectly centered (I did crop a bit at the edges, though) but the picture is still not centered because the actual stuff isn't! One of the doors is shorter than the other, and this gives the whole thing a bit of tension. Just enough not to be obvious but still notice it.



Click on the Read more link to see more of Leiden through my eyes.

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.

IT'S ABOUT THE FOCUS.

There's a quote attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson (my favorite photographer of all times) that goes: "The only thing worthwhile in photography is geometry. Everything else is mere sentiment".

Part of what makes a picture great is the way it makes the viewer's eyes scan the scene. You probably don't notice it, but every time we look at a picture our eyes follow a path trough it. We cannot focus on the whole picture at once, we follow lines and we eventually come to rest on the natural focus of the picture. Ideally your subject will be the focus, attention should be slowly drawn towards the artistic center of the picture.

Everything in a picture is connected by -real or imaginary- lines. Sometimes lines in the picture will draw your eyes away from the subject, out of the frame; when that happens the picture fails because it cannot keep the attention of the viewer. The picture itself tries to get you to look away!

Sometimes, lines intersect and you get a nice, natural frame in the picture. You know the cliche: The typical picture were a window frames a nice scene in the outside. A picture within the picture.

Natural frames are more common (and useful) than what you may think. Many things can serve as a frame, trees, doorways and windows are super common. Framing people or things with other objects also works.Framing your subject in a way "captures" the viewer's attention. Their gaze will tend to stay within the framed portion of the picture.

And now, for something completely different (I promise I'll return to frames later):

We often get the impression that the goal of photography is to represent reality as perfectly as we can. That may be true at some point for journalistic photography, but if you view photography as an art-form (and I do) then that statement could not be farther away from the truth.

The two most obvious factors leading to this are:

1)COLOR

2) DEPTH OF FIELD

Let's concentrate in the depth of field (DOF). I will tackle color (or the lack of it) sometime in the future.

Technically, the DOF is defined as the portion of the image that remains in acceptable focus. A picture with a shallow DOF will throw everything but the focus point out of focus. On a picture with a deep DOF, everything will be sharp.

Pictures with a shallow DOF are  completely unrealistic, yet they are fascinating.

You get a very clear, distinctive center of the picture: the subject, the only thing in focus. The rest is a mystery (and there's mystery again...). That mystery that gets the viewer's mind working, wondering and filling in the gaps.

My writing today is particularly bad, so I will get to the pictures:

Hit the read link to continue...

I'M AN INTROVERT.

There. That's my confession of the day.

I'm shy in real life and it translates directly into the way i take pictures. In a sense, I photograph the way I live: trying to be as low key as possible and, above all, trying not to interrupt anything.

In fact, I found that the way you are -your personality- usually translates quite a bit into the way you take pictures.

A couple of years ago, I spent some days in New York with a good friend from the university.

He is:

a) Not a photographer at all.

b) The walking definition of an extrovert.

So, there we were, just spending some time together after not seeing each other for a while. I was -of course- carrying my camera everywhere with me. At some point, the trip turned into an ad-hoc photo workshop; he had his simple P&S with him and started to show a real interest in pictures. We discussed and shared shots for the whole 3 days we spent together.

The point I'm trying to get at is that he, being absolutely inexperienced, took some really good pictures. He did so because he (apparently) lacks any sense of self-consciousness. He just does not care what other people think, so if he has to go up to someone and just blatantly shove his camera up this stranger's face, he'll just do it. I'd probably rather miss the picture than face the fact that someone knows I'm taking their picture.

When you have this kind of personality, you can either let the shyness get in the way and prevent you from taking the pictures you know you want to OR you can use this knowledge to your advantage and actually grow as a photographer.

I know my shyness limits my photography, but I try to use my photography to challenge (and overcome) that shyness.

I also try to use what comes naturally (to me) to my advantage; I mentioned on my first post that everyone has a style no matter how "good" or "bad" a photographer they are. You just need to really look.

In my case, if you look at my photography you'll quickly notice an abundance of pictures such as this one:

I have TONS of shots of the back of people. TONS. They just come naturally.

(Indeed, it's easy to see why a self-conscious guy who loves people pictures would have lots of pics from this point of view).

In the case of this particular shot, the perspective gives it that kind of mystery that attracts me so much to pictures. You see just enough of these people to ask a lot of questions. The setting helps too, the antique look of the huge door, the old school clothes they wear, it all adds up.

I like the picture.

I would frame it a bit differently if I had the chance, but it's not bad considering it’s the only shot I took and had some seconds to think focus and expose. I like the diagonals (again) every line intersects at that bright spot on the right, where you see two out of focus dudes walking. Every time you look at the picture, no matter what you focus on first, your eyes will end up following the lines that end there.

Click the read link to see some more "back" pictures.

ON THE PLEASANT SURPRISES THAT COME FROM USING FILM

It's time to (mis)quote a famous photographer to make a point: Robert Capa once said that he didn't like to develop films as soon as he was done shooting, he opted to leave them somewhere for a few months before actually developing them. He said the separation from the images brings about an honesty and just plain fresh look to the images that is impossible to achieve when you have the idea of the photograph still in your head.
I tried looking for that quote just now, but -of course- I couldn't find it. I'm sure I read that somewhere though… Maybe it wasn't Capa and I was just subconsciously justifying my deplorable habits of leaving exposed rolls on a drawer somewhere for months? Who knows.
At any given point in time I have a backlog of around 4-10 exposed rolls ready for development (there's 6 B&W and 6 color exposed films awaiting for me right this second, btw). I would be lying if I said the reason for that was purely artistic. Bottom line is that I'm lazy. Really lazy, and developing, scanning and retouching films is quite time consuming… Specially when you get something like 2 or 3 keepers a roll if you are lucky.
Why do it then?
Well, the short answer is that I really like film. I like the look I get with it, I like how it forces me to think twice before pressing the shutter (after all every picture is directly translated into money spent) AND I like the way it makes me feel when I pull out a roll from the tank and get that first look at the negatives. When you have NO idea what the hell it is that you are developing you can be very pleasantly surprised. Film is a bit like vinyl, its adherents swear by it citing all sort of "technical" and "romantic" reasons while the detractors have just moved on and enjoy the convenience of mp3s and jpgs. Maybe it's not a coincidence I like both vinyls and film? who knows.
Anyway. Back on topic: film. I'm posting this because of a picture I scanned yesterday. I'll get to that in a while.
I usually try to keep a marker with me and try to write as much as I can into the actual rolls after exposing them, things like the ISO used, the place, camera and lenses used. Of course, this is usually not the case and I get to stare at a series of almost completely unmarked rolls and end up deciding on which to develop in a quite random fashion. I did just that yesterday, I wanted to develop one specific roll I knew I had exposed in Madrid at the beginning of the year and had a free spot on the tank…. so I went for the only other roll shot @100 ISO.
I said this before but I'll say it again. I love taking a first peak at a negative. It is an amazing experience. We are too used to seeing pictures instantly in the back of our cameras. Pictures just become irrelevant. We loose every connection we had with them.
We shoot and review. When reviewing we decide to keep or delete and we go on with our lives, shooting even more pictures. Maybe even variations of the ones we already saw. We use the previews to experiment and change. We KNOW how the picture looks and we can keep on trying until we get the effect we desire. When shooting this way, pictures are something that happened just 10 seconds ago. We look at the final image while still immersed in its context. We have no perspective, we delete pictures we should have kept and keep pictures we should delete.
By the time I get home and dump the images into the computer, I've seen those pictures so many times that I've become desensitized to them. There's no surprises. Everything is as expected.
But with film, there is no experimenting. At least no recursive experimenting. Everything is done blindly. And because each frame costs me money (and time) I tend to think twice before pressing the shutter. I cannot explain it, but I take different pictures with film and with digital. Not better or worse. Different.
Which brings me to my point: Images left on their own, undiscovered for months, and their effect on us when we discover them.
So there I was yesterday, patiently scanning 2 rolls of mostly boring Madrid pictures when I came across this frame:

I said it before: this is not a blog for amazing pictures. It's for pictures that move me. And this one did.
I had NO recollection at all of ever taking this shot. I didn't even realize where the hell  that was…. but there was something about the pic that interested me. can't put my finger on it though….
That's stockholm, I later realized. I thought I didn't use any film there… It was so dark so early that the high ISO of digital seemed like the only way to go there… but apparently not. I cannot explain everything that happened to me in the fraction of a second that took me to realize this was stockholm and later to actually remember that I had indeed taken the picture. When I finally did, it was magical. Not because the picture itself is any good (btw, there's something I like about the pic, but it's not a remarkable image in any sense) but it literally transported me there. I replayed everything about that amazing swedish weekend in my head. Images started pouring into my mind: the cold, the 3 o'clock sunset, the fire alarm going off in my room (long story...), meeting one of my all time musical heroes and asking him if his new record was any good (seriously… I  actually asked him that), the swedish dude that wouldn't stop practicing his spanish on me (Damn you, why where you not a hot blonde swedish supermodel?).... whatever.. it all came back. It was... good.
Could I have gotten the same effect from the digital captures from the same trip? I seriously doubt it. I mean, I love some of the digital pics I took in Sweden, but they are just that, pictures. By the time I saw them on the computer screen I had lived with them for a few days already, examining them repeatedly on the camera monitor.
The film shots, on the other hand, where completely off the radar. They were forgotten for 4 months, waiting for me to discover them. And when I did discover them it was amazing.
On the other hand though… this waiting thing can be a bit unpleasant. I had pictures of three four different "ex's" pop out in recently developed films last year. I'm sure not one of them would have really appreciated a call telling them I got some nice pictures of them.
Too bad, cause some of them were really pretty pictures. :)

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 :)

Bienvenidos

Soy maxi y este es mi blog. Todo comenzó a principios de 2010, cuando de tanto leer blogs se me ocurrió la genial idea de abrir uno. El único problema es que no tenía mucho para decir.
O al menos, eso creía.
Se me dio por escribir acerca de mi gran pasión, que es la fotografía. Soy uno de esos amateurs que sueñan algún día tener los huevos para poder hacer de su hobby un medio de vida, y aunque secretamente piense que algunas de sus obras (obras... ja!) tienen algún tipo de valor... no se anima a dar ese paso.
Es más, me avergüenzo de mostrar mi fotografía. Un poco porque creo que mi fotografía muestra mucho más de mi de lo que me gusta mostrar y otro poco porque le tengo un poco de miedo a conocer la verdadera opinión del resto. Si, es bastante idiota todo.

Pero bueno, ahí es donde surge la idea del blog. Tarde o temprano voy a tener que escuchar al mundo, y que me mejor que empezar por un lugar en donde no me conozca nadie? Todos los que lleguen a leer esto serán desconocidos para mí. Ideal para recoger una opinión no sugestionada por el hecho de conocer al verdadero max y brutalmente honesta. Ya que la interné nos hace honestos a todos. No?

Empecé este proyecto hace unos meses en tumblr, luego lo abandoné y ahora lo estoy recobrando. Quizás cambiando un poco el enfoque. No lo se aún. No se si mudarme definitivamente a blogspot o mantener los 2 a la par... Por el momento haré esto último. Tumblr tiene cosas buenísimas que le faltan a blogspot y viceversa, así que por el momento pueden visitar ambos. (http://visualexplorations.tumblr.com es la dirección del hermanito).

Una última cosa. Yo soy más porteño que la pizza de cancha, pero por diversas razones empecé el blog en inglés y por el momento así seguirá!.