Articles2014

The improbable dissociation of content and emotion

The photograph you can see below was taken while casually strolling down by myself towards the Fields Museum on a Sunday morning in Chicago. Its one of these side of the road pictures that I have come to enjoy more over time but cannot quite pinpoint why.

The rails above the street are part of Chicago’s famous public transport system called “the L” which is basically a subway that is mostly overground in the down town area. As the author of the picture, it is challenging to dissociate the graphical and compository quality of this picture with the emotions of this wonderful holiday. It shows a moment of peace and serenity with time for introversion which I don’t often get to have. I will post a gallery of several of these sort of pictures in the future.

The hidden beauty above us

Right above use at every instant of our lives there is something breathtakingly gorgeous that is sure to appeal to anyone no matter the age or cultural background. Yet we can hardly every appreciate it in its full beauty.

I have recently spent a few weeks in Australia. It was my first experience in the area and I wished to see some of the famous landscapes that central Australia is known for, such as Uluru (Ayers Rock). All of what I saw during daytime was wonderful but it was after sunset that the greatest thing of all came to shine: starlight across the horizon as I had never seen it before.

On the second night of camping I took the long exposure photograph you see below. It took the camera thirty seconds to capture what your naked eyes can marvel at constantly. The campfire that shines brightly in this picture was almost extinct and two of my fellow travellers where chatting well beyond midnight. At least a hundred kilometers away on the horizon, lightning strikes from a storm illuminated the night sky and just about every minute a shooting star flew above us. The bright area across the photograph is our Milky Way galaxy, which I had never seen before.

It was with this view that I fell asleep in a swag outside and it was with that view that I woke up before sunrise to continue the hike. Something you will never forget.

The ongoing expansion of artistic possibilities

I began getting into photography in the middle of the digital camera revolution in the early 2000s. Back when analogue photography was still common, digital photography opened a whole new world of possibilities, mainly because I knew exactly how the photograph looked right after it was taken and could thus play with colors, depth of field, blurring, composition and more.
Since then, my digital photography was always one with relatively little digital editing and alterations.

It was 2013 when I realized that the tiny camera on my new cell phone has incredible image quality and is even able to include esthetic color features as well as dynamic panorama stiching simply on the fly. The results of my experiments with this during a recent trip to Chicago are composed below.

Meanwhile, after a couple of photoshop tutorials I also realized that manipulating the content of photos (not just colors) has become so easy and accessible. Combining new camera features and software continues to open yet more and more gates to endless possibilities of photographic creativity with millions of people being able to join in and exhibit their great work to the world.

Does that make it easier or harder than before to achieve outstanding artistic work? I leave this question to you without an answer, as I yet need to find out myself.
Chicago Panorama