“My sympathies were with people who struggled. There was also my mistrust of people who made the rules.” Robert Frank, documentary photographer of immense influence. He passed away at 94. The New York Times had a wonderful profile on him back in 2015. (A bonus link on outtakes from his book, The Americans. )
It is not uncommon to come across photographs of the magical Italian city of Venice pop-up on my Instagram feed. It is an architectural gem. Canals and bridges criss-cross the city, that is made even more magical by the interplay of light and shadows. I quite enjoy the work of Italian-Austrian photographer, Ando Fuchs. There is a group of talented photographers who use long-exposure techniques to bring the city of Venice to life.
But for me, Venice has been more than a place for making photographs. I don’t know when, or how, I fell in love with the city. I suspect, it had something to do with mystery writer Donna Leon’s beautifully written books. She talked about the city with such emotion, and in such vivid details, that at times I felt, I lived in the city of 60,000 residents. I have read her twenty-off books many times, and perhaps
You might have heard that Leica has a new lens called the Leica APO-Summicron-SL 1: 2/50 ASPH. For a few weeks now, I have had the opportunity to use a pre-release version of the lens on my SL. I’ll cut right to the chase and tell you that I’m very happy with the results.
Before I dive into the details, let me be very clear: I don’t shoot anything but landscapes, mostly long exposures. About two-thirds of my photos are shot with my camera on a tripod. I am painfully slow, and I treat my digital cameras as if I am using a film camera. Where most people use techniques like multiple exposures and are more adventures, my style is very staid.
Attempting to capture a few dozen photos in 24 hours is adventurous for me. Even getting two to five images on a given day is a great personal achievement. In other words, don’t look to me to give you feedback on the lens from the perspective of a travel photographer, a portrait photographer, or a casual photographer. So, don’t think of this as a review. I am simply sharing my experience.
Continue reading...Continue reading The Must-Have Lens for your Leica SL
Here are some stunning color photos of the legendary Romanov Costume Ball of 1903. The people pictured were all about that Czar life. This is the work of Olga Shirnina, who has colorized these and many other old soviet-era images. She also uses the nickname, Klimbim.
A few days ago my friend Felix let me use one of his Fuji cameras. It has been a while since I owned an xPro2 and forgot how much I love that form factor. I don’t much care for the Fuji rendition of raw files – not sure why, but I prefer my SL and its muted DNG files.
But, back to Fuji — I am just impressed how much complexity they have packed into their cameras and made a menu that is human understandable versus Sony. That said, you will take my SL from my cold dead hands. I believe love is forever – even when you have shortcomings that annoy the hell out of you — in partners and in cameras, or vice versa.
Have a beautiful week of great photos and enjoying the slow wind down of summer.
Originally posted on my Instagram stories!
A few days back, I had a chance to grab coffee with one of my favorite photographers, Adrian Villa. He is a software developer, who got tired of sitting behind the screen and keyboard and sought the freedom that comes from being in the open and making beautiful landscapes. Our coffee conversation was about the choices we make, not in the gear we use, but we choose to capture and how we decide to share it with others. We talked extensively about constraints in equipment and choices, and how they help improve our creativity.
As an artist, he has eschewed the latest and greatest cameras and instead has focused on creating stark, minimal, and hauntingly beautiful monochromatic images. He uses a generation old APS-C camera, in addition to lugging around his Bronica medium format camera.
In a few years, Adrian has found his voice by being incredibly obsessive about his art
It has been around five years since I started making photos. Over the past few months, I feel that a certain level of harmony has developed between what my mind sees and what the camera captures. Though, the real magic still happens when I transform that digital negative into my interpretation of the scene.
So, what have I learned thus far?
Continue reading...Continue reading My Photo Journey: Year Five
I am writing this four years to the day after I fell in love.
In the aftermath of the GigaOM shutdown, I left town to spend a weekend with friends in New York and to take a break from all the negativity that was enveloping. I needed to revisit the place where it all started. I was in search of closure, though finding it – I ultimately learned – would take much longer. After I arrived, I began my healing process, as many people do, with some retail therapy. I stopped by my favorite camera store and chit-chatted with the staff. Don who would later become a dear friend, showed it to me.
The Leica SL. It was love at first sight.
Five years is a long time, so it isn’t a surprise that Ello might have faded from the minds of the people. And after being an initial skeptic, I have quietly become an occasional visitor — more like a lurker on the network, secretly following some fantastic photographers and their creativity. Many are not even my kind of photographs and visuals, but the sheer quality of images is stunning and one can learn so much from these works. Here is a link to the page of trending photos on Ello. But that isn’t all. There are so many amazing artists including this photo/visual surrealist.
It is the antithesis of the likes-fueled, influencer-juiced world of Instagram and its algorithmic overlordship of creativity. If Instagram is the machine and crowd-powered enemy of creativity for the sake of creativity, Ello is just a place where there are fewer judgments about the art. It is not just about photos. There is art, fashion, music, design, architecture — and it feels like the East Village long before the faux-pubs, condos and the Whole Foods turned it into urban-suburbia.
