Month: January 2012

Week 3 | 2012

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Metamorphosis & Finding oneself   So I purchased another book from the great folks at Craft & Vision titled “Close to Home” which really just reinforced all the things I’ve been thinking about as of late. To give you a brief synopsis of Close to Home I’ll allude to one of the quotes within the book which says: “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”   – Elliot Erwitt

Week 2 | 2012

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A Rite of Passage As I continue to “look and observe” through my photographic path the more I realize that opportunities are everywhere. At times, photographing becomes second nature and yet other times the creative machinery must be kicked started. Now I’m realizing you need some sort of stamina to photograph habitually. For me, I feel the urge to photograph most of the time but when coupled with a little something called “Life & Responsibilities” things get a little bit more complicated.

Pictures don’t have to be perfect

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The photo is a thing in itself. And that’s what still photography is all about. — Garry Winogrand Pictures do not have to be perfect. Cartier-Bresson was not. Walker Evans was not. Daido Moriyama is not. A lot of folks are gun-ho and always raving about image quality, mega pixels, sensor size, this or that, or Canon vs. Nikon. I say, just look back and analyze some the greats and you’ll see a lot of their recognized pictures are far from great on these technical characteristics but exude a different sense of greatness. Its much more than that. There are things like composition, the decisive moment, shape, form, color or lack thereof, mood, feeling, and emotion. An image can have a certain mix of these aforementioned qualities and still be an amazing image. Gear is irrelevant and often time certain cameras can have a certain allure to them. I won’t deny that I’d love to shoot with an M9 and a 50 Lux but the fact is I don’t own one. Will I let that affect …

Panasonic GF1, Street Photography

Disconnected Fragments — 1

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What do you do with images that somehow don’t fit in any category. Well, make  a new category and call it — Just Stuff. These are all DNG converted to have the look of the Lumix GF1/LX3 Dynamic B&W with a custom preset. I like this look quite a bit. When I compared the SOOC jpegs shot in Dynamic B&W with the Panasonic GF1, these raw files converted looked to be an exact representation. Which works out great for me, since  I now have another way in which to process my raw files to have this distinctive look.

Ambiguity in a photograph

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I think that mysterious things happen in familiar places…. I like ambiguity in a photograph… When we do not know why aphotographer has taken a picture, and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden, we discover something that we start seeing — Saul Leiter I tweeted earlier this week about this monumental quote I recently discovered and how it must be shared. It is exactly how I feel about this path I’m heading. I don’t know how to quite describe it but I’m fascinated by just pressing that shutter. Its almost like something has drained my sometimes impulsive urges to photograph the streets of Miami and all of a sudden I’m awaken to new a reality. A reality, I think Daido Moriyama found out a long time ago and hence his great body of work chronicling his reality: For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality. — Daido Moriyama