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

Your photography sucks! – A wake up call from 2007

Click here to read the full article and all photographs of this project page!

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It was in fall of 2007. I had only recently moved to Paris for a year of university abroad and had discovered a university photography association which I gladly joined. The concept of the weekly meetings was, each of the 3-6 people that joined brought a couple of photographs either dealing with a certain assigned topic or whatever he/she saw fit. The classes were informal and heavily based on critisicing the artist.
At that time, I was more convinced about the value of my photography much more than I am actually now. I usually had around five photographs on a USB stick with me and we huddled around an old computer screen to discuss them. One afternoon, as I brought in five pictures on a USB stick that I was rather proud of, I got very heavily criticised about my selection for a good. It was painful and I had a hard time understanding why it seemed like everything I showed sucked.

The realisation came later: Whenever you show more than one photograph, each image stands in the context of the rest.

Click here to read the full article and all photographs of this project page!

Simple Abstract

Abstract photography is a style of it’s own. Many pictures of graphic nature fit into this categorie. Usually we face closeups of objects and settings that we can hardly recognize. This is the point and there is not much else to say. There is not much of a story to tell and in my opinion, the viewer should look at it more like an abstract light painting. Continue reading “Simple Abstract”