Finding Harmony in Chaos

Not long ago I travelled to the environments of the city of Чёрнобыл (Chernobyl). It’s a wasteland that is famous for the biggest desaster in the history of nuclear engineering. Ukranians have very mixed feelings about this place, but generally it is not something they are interested in seeing, since it’s place of bad memory and they believe it is dangerous. Continue reading “Finding Harmony in Chaos”

A Style of Sincerety

If you have been following my entries so far, you might notice that this picture is completely off my usual style (if I have any). It’s very simple and bland. It’s composed in a simple manner, has some pretty boring light, a straightforward perspective and some trashy elements like the cars in the back. Yet it is this simplicity of this picture that actually enhances the mood on this cloudy morning, as a good friend of mine (an editor of my blog) was lost in thoughts on this miserably tiny playground. Continue reading “A Style of Sincerety”

Traces

TracesWhen we are somewhere far away from home, everything is exotic, interessting, strange and somehow we end up taking pictures of the same “strange” things over and over again. In my opinion, you should try looking elsewhere, once you have the feeling to have already seen the exact same image you just shot elsewhere. It’s not easy to make pictures that are not self explanatory. Continue reading “Traces”

Graphism

In my opinion, when a photograph is described as “graphic”, it refers to the abstraction of the image’s elements (that you can often relate to posters). This is usually done with strong contrasts, sharp edges and few elements. Parisian posters like this one from the early 20th century are historical examples from the advertising industry.

This picutre, taken at the “Caminito” in Buenos Aires on a late summer afternoon, is an example of an extremely graphical photograph. The surface is perfectly flat and the elements are strongly contrasted by the colors. Continue reading “Graphism”

Atmosphere and the point of view

A campfire somewhere far out, close to the alps. Particles of the burned wood are blasted into the sky, while the heat radiation warms the gathered crowd, itself hypnotized by the dancing motion of the flames.

Two photographs are shown here. While the above is clearly the one of my preference, I wanted to present both to explain what different focal lenghts do to the perspective and ultimately to you as the viewer of the image. Continue reading “Atmosphere and the point of view”

To read and to understand

When a photograph lies infront of you, you uncounsly read it. You eye is unable to see more than just a tiny spot with full sharpness. So when you see a picture (unless it’s tiny) your eye scans it for certain patterns. Usually those are: foreground before background, light before dark and left before right.

When you check out the picture above, it starts as a seamlessly looking scene inside some sort of train. Then you continue towards the right (and dark) part and it starts getting confusing. Questions arise and confusion starts: How was it possible to take this picture? Are those two pictures in one? What’s the black silhouette on the right half? Where is the photographer? Continue reading “To read and to understand”

Frozen Decisive Instant

Photography inside museums is a strange subject.There are a lot of museums in the world who forbid photography. Sometimes it’s in order to protect the works from people who can’t manage to turn their flashlight off, sometimes it is to protect the authors property rights (why not take a nice picture of that painting on the wall). Is there any point of photographing art in a museum? Continue reading “Frozen Decisive Instant”

A different approach

Most of you have probably been asked to take snapshots on some event. Maybe you took this seriously and tried to create a comprehensive photographic documentation. Let’s say you shot weddings, parties, conventions, presentations… in the end your ordinary audience expects a certain format and type of picture from you. They may recognize that (since you know what you’re doing) your images are “nicer” than the ordinary, but what if you shoot it completely differently? Continue reading “A different approach”

The Human Ingredient

Images with a good composition, often have lines leading towards the corners, tangents gently touching the sides, objects placed by the golden ration and so on… Yet geometrically well composed pictures often lack a certain “something”. This little something that gives a scene it’s uniqueness so that you truly captured a moment in time that could not have been taken a second later or a second before.

Wherein lies that certain something? Well it’s mostly the so called “élément humain” (french) or the humant element/ingredient. Humans are hard to control and that’s why photographers often tend to avoid them. There is barely anything more interesting and at the same time more complicated that human beings in front of a lens, but that’s a whole different subject.

For comparison: this is overall geometrically the same shot but with no interesting elements in it. The original is there for comparison: