Posts tagged photography
I made some high quality wallpapers from my Iceland photos for your desktop, iPad, and iPhone. Feel free to download and share.
“ Despite all this, I’ve stubbornly stuck to my basic plan of being an artist, because it’s what I love and want to do, and once in a while I’ll reap some reward or other from my hard work, which makes it all worthwhile. Every several months, though, I’ll hit a wall. My mind goes completely blank. I have no ideas, good or bad, and find myself thinking, “Ok, I guess that’s it then. Maybe I should have stuck to biochemistry after all.”** I’ll mope around for a bit, look at some of the stuff I’ve made in the past and think, “How’d I come up with that? That’s actually pretty clever. Where did my cleverness go? Wtf??”
I have to share this as it’s damn good advice from one of my favorite photographers from one of my favorite countries.
I recommend this post (and the entire blog) not just to photographers, but to anyone in a creative field, especially those trying to freelance it. It’s definitely how I’ve been feeling lately (which explains the lack of actual posting from me. Sorry).
Now this is a serene way to work.
(Yes, I am finally uploading more Iceland photos!)
I can’t begin to describe how mind-blowing my week in Iceland was, just as I can’t begin to go through the 8+ gigs of photos I took there, mostly because every single evening and most days this week I will be attending the ever-amazing Unsound festival.
So, to compensate, I will offer some bite-sized memories of the island, and one photo of tiny horses, because who doesn’t love those?
Basically, during my one week in Iceland, I:
- jumped on rocks as if I were five years old jumping on my bed
- followed Icelanders we had just met from club to club until 5 am
- danced to Icelandic pop
- turned 28
- ate on a boat
- saw the film Backyard, and accidentally stumbled onto the backyard where it was filmed on the way home
- took photographs of tiny horses (see above)
- rode one of said tiny horses
- touched a glacier
- thanked a volcano
- hiked up to a hot river
- ran from epic rain
- saw four rainbows in one day
- ate shark (not that good, actually)
- slept on a horse farm
- developed a troubling addiction to flatbrauð (Icelandic flatbread)
- fell in love (again)
Once the festival is over and work stuff has calmed down, I promise to tie myself down to a chair, open up Photoshop and Lightroom and nothing else, and shop those photos until they bleed (or look pretty, one of the two). Until then, I recommend you read the Iceland Tumblr, because it’s just as charming, strange and wonderful as the country itself.
This year was the first year I had a photo press pass for OFF Festival, one of my favorite music festivals in Poland (after Unsound, of course). So I took an obscene number of photos, the best of which I’ve gathered here.
Even though I liked some of the other bands more musically (Mew especially), I have to admit that the pure showmanship and fun of The Flaming Lips made it one of the most memorable performances I’ve seen.
Also, taking photos while dodging giant balloons bombarding your head and camera was a new and exciting challenge.
I’m just going to keep entering Tumblr photography contests with my photos from Croatia, because they’re awesome.
Scenes from a pillow fight
Because there’s a holiday this week (at least for those of us who live in countries with archaic Catholic traditions), I’m feeling somewhat refreshed and jovial, so I’m going to write about something a bit more fun for a change. Namely, the relatively new tradition of the Great Cracovian Pillow Fight*.
It starts out innocently enough. Students from the city’s universities gather at a set date in various corners of the Market Square, armed with pillows and dressed in t-shirt colors corresponding to their academic institution as designated on the event invitation. At the first note of the trumpeter from St. Mary’s marking the hour, they go running, pillows at the ready, towards the designated meeting point. The battle has begun.
At first it’s mild: gentle hits, lots of laughter.
But soon enough, the feathers start flying.
And shit gets intense.
Of course, it’s all in good fun.
Until your expensive lens gets slammed with a stray pillow, anyway.
Or until the cops start arresting people.
Because here’s a not-so-funny detail: the pillow fight was denied a permit by the city, probably on account of the mess that tends to get left behind (see below). So technically, kids can (and did) get citations for participating in an illegal demonstration - 15 tickets and 17 warnings were issued by the municipal authorities, namely for littering and disturbing the peace. Nonetheless, that didn’t spoil the fun for most participants, and there was a clean-up effort afterwards to rid the square of its non-pigeon feathers.
However, it looks like the right to bear pillows is still lacking in Poland.
*It’s not actually called that. But it should be.
Scenes from a Funeral: Photographs from the memorial for President Lech Kaczyński and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska in Krakow
As much as I love photography, I have found it to be the most frustrating art form. Because it’s the only one that aims to perfectly duplicate reality, not just represent it in a different way. Paintings can be abstract or realistic, but they are meant to be a representation. Music is always an interpretation, filtered through one’s perception. But photographs, in theory, can reproduce a moment. In theory.
But in reality, of course failure is inevitable. Even if you capture the beauty of a colorful butterfly resting on a flower, you won’t smell the flower in the picture; you won’t feel the sun or the breeze of that day; you won’t remember the exact thoughts running through your mind as you snapped the shutter. But it’s about as close as you can come to permanently capturing an image aside from memory - and memory, though more vivid, is far more fragile than paper or bits on a hard drive.
And yet, in traditional photography, no matter how well done, you cannot capture everything the naked eye captures; it’s just not physically possible. And I guess that’s why I love HDR photography so much - both schools of it. Because realistic HDR gets as close to capturing the way a human eye captures an image as is currently possible. And unrealistic, or heavily tone-mapped or however you want to call it HDR has become an art form in itself, making photographic visions only seen before in dreams possible.
