I haven't done too much with my alleged project, but it's validating to see that something very similar has been done before.
Picture with camels, Marrakech, Morocco 2006 by Aislinn Leggett
Thanks Tmbldr.
Wakaba Noda, "Making a Map"
I received my copy of Wakaba Noda's "Making a Map" a couple of weeks ago. First things first, I like it a lot. It also feels very personal to me. Maybe it's because I'm the same age (born in 84 baby) as Wakaba Noda, and it seems like I understand things visually in the same way that he does, even if I'm not able to represent them as clearly. There's a world-making -- or would that be map-making? -- innocence in what's left out of the frame, which is what will strike me first when I return to this book in five or ten years and consider my experience of looking at it now. Let me see if I can explain this "world-making innocence."
The images in this book are all very carefully composed; in many cases there's just a landscape broken up by something very small. A grove is interrupted by a young couple, an electrical tower perches on a hillside, a black speck of an airplane dots a gray sky. There's rarely any clutter in the frame, so your eye is always directed to the "subject" of the photo, even when it only takes up a tiny part of the frame. These images are quite pastoral, which is where the world-making comes in: there's not much that says "2008" about this book. Even when the subject matter is closer to "home," as it were, there's a clear, abstracting distance: an airport scene looks to have been taken from the terminal, and a cityscape from the observation tower.
These images don't convey notions of technology or progress; they continue the meditation of the other photos. (It makes sense that there's no text presented with the images.) It feels to me like Wakaba Noda put these images together to make as strong an aesthetic statement as possible, which I appreciate, because that's really all I'm trying to work out right now. As a "young internet-savvy person interested in photography," this speaks to me a lot more than the majority of the work by "young internet photographers" out there, i.e. "lifestyle" photography as you call this photography? has named it.
Images from the book are at Wakaba Noda's site
The book provoked some interesting questions for me as an object. In particular, it was strange to have already seen a number of the images from the book posted to various photography blogs before holding it in my hands. You can basically look at the whole book online without buying it. Photography is about surprising; what expectations should I have had as I opened it up? Should I have expected it to present something 'new' to me? Does it take away from the experience of a book (where the photographer controls the presentation) to have already seen some of the images in a blog setting? I think to a certain extent, yes, but on the other hand, I found Farewell Books through the internet.
"A book, any book, is for us a sacred object," says Borges. Are we now in danger of saying: "farewell, books!"? Possibly, but with more honest publications like this, I don't see why books shouldn't continue to fare pretty well indeed.
Videos from Casio Exilim EX-F1
Here are some videos taken with the Casio Exilim EX-F1, an extraordinary camera that was recently written up by David Pogue in the New York Times. These videos are not mine, they were taken by a colleague in Japan who was nice enough to let me post them.
The Times article has a full description of the camera, but to sum up, it is capable of recording up to 1200 frames per second, where each frame is a full 6MP image. (These videos were at 300fps, probably less now that they've been compressed.) You can go back, watch the resulting slow-motion video and "click" the "shutter" when you see the image you want. You can then delete the unnecessary frames, leaving you with the few 6MP frames that you picked out. Does that make sense?
I'm sure some people might read about this camera and think that this technology is killing off photography as we know it, or the "decisive moment." Hey, mastering the EX-F1 will produce one kind of image, mastering a rangefinder (or SLR or toy camera...) will produce another.
As the B blog points out in a level-headed post differentiating film from video, the limitation of working with a single moment is what makes photography compelling. In this post he writes about photos more from a viewer's perspective -- "it can tell you nothing about a scene and for me that's great" -- but I think this limitation is helpful for a photographer, too. Over a five second span, the empty spaces between three shots might prove to be more useful than 7997 extra frames...
These videos are hosted by Flickr. A sign of the apocalypse? I don't think so.
A nice use of HDR
I've hated on HDR photography in the past, but I just found someone who uses it in a more subtle way than you might find on world famous geek blogs. I like this picture because it doesn't immediately scream, "look at me HDR is cool!" It looks like the only thing that's really been altered in this photo is the clouds, and to me this is pretty tasteful. How long until we see in-camera HDR? This feature would probably lead to more garish HDR photos floating around the internet (check out one of the comments on this picture to see what I mean) but this is the first time I've seen an HDR photo that actually looked good.
by →RiGHt !!
Hey Arturo, are you still trying to cook something up with this technology?
"What kind of photography do you do?"
I was having lunch with some people at work, and I mentioned that I liked photography. "Oh, what kind of photography do you do," came the question. I've never had a good answer for this. Maybe I take it too seriously! The most honest answer would be a simple "oh, I'm an amateur." This time, I said something like "well, I don't do anything with fancy lighting. I try to carry a camera with me and take pictures when I'm traveling, or just walking down the street."
If I call to mind some of my favorite photographers - William Eggleston, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Daido Moriyama - I can't group them all together neatly. I'm bringing this up because I try to emulate them. The most fitting category for all of them would probably be "fine art," but this doesn't help because it seems to me that people like Eggleston and Moriyama (less so Sugimoto) forced the term "fine art" to apply to their work. They went out and shot stuff, and it was later interpreted as "fine" art. Aspiring to make "fine art" sounds very humanist (sick) to me, in any case.
Next time I get asked, I'll probably just say "abstract stuff" and be done with it. Having a Moo card for further explanation would also help, I'm sure.
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