Notes

Who reads poetry anyway? Only other poets.

(Blake Andrews, during an interview with Bryan Formhals)

It is a strange place to be, this one where I am now. My passion and love for photographs (taking them, editing and discussing and commenting) is something in between two sides that I see.

On one side there are all those photographs that most people would judge beautiful, the kind of photographs that appear on glossy magazines, large exhibitions and contests of relevance; think Avedon, McCurry, Leibovitz and the winners of awards like Wildlife Photographer.

I left Bari many years ago. It is my adoptive hometown, and when I return every once in a while, I enjoy walking around aimlessly, meeting old friends, the cool breeze from the sea, rediscovering situations and places that haven’t really changed that much.

I think a lot about photography; usually random, incoherent things that I tend to forget (or more often, forget the point I was trying to make). This is an attempt to make some order. A second part is half-written. It may be published sooner or later.

portrait photographers

Are they really that good? As Bill and Jefferey often say on their show, how hard can it be to take a good photograph of George Clooney or some beautiful model?

The world of art photography fascinates me. I especially love those who refer to themselves as “artists”, their art being typically exemplified by boring, flat, sad photos where the “artist” himself is shown with vacuous eyes, half naked, a cigarette maybe, with another sad human or animal being by his side. Or empty landscapes showing detritus and crap with not an ounce of interestingness.

I find it wildly entertaining and maddening at the same time their ability to write so much and with so many complicated words about the void their art is made of.

Since I picked up Python a couple of years ago I have enjoyed my everyday job more and more. It’s like being thrown back to my 12-year old self playing with a ZX Spectrum or Commodore-128, when all I wanted was to create videogames or do some other stuff¹; only back then I didn’t have the perseverance and the excuses that I have now.

“Excuses” is a fine word for what I do; I am assigned a task (or sometimes I go looking for one), and I see this task only as an excuse to solve the problem in a way that I see fit. So if there’s even a hint of repetition I will go and write a for-loop to do that. If I need to use a dumb-ass software that I don’t like I will write the dumb-ass piece of code myself². Etc.

Months ago I asked the OTP community about their online reading habits. I mentioned my favourite blogs and briefly discussed my main concern which is: is online reading just a filler, sort of reading your twitter feed when you’re bored¹?

Anyway, my idea is that yes, books give you something else, something that takes you away for longer times, requiring a committment to the act of reading and comprehension that is essential if you really want to go deep into a subject.

[Click here for italian version.]

This is a short post just to let the readers know that I am ready to be back on track with some brand new content – and apologies for not being very active these past few months here or on my other channels like twitter or Google+.

I have been busy with moving to the new house, stay with my family, work and all this sort of things that simply takes your time away; I have to say, some of these things are exhausting mentally (e.g., the moving!), others are quite different, you simply enjoy having your time taken away (and that’s why I’ve put those two photographs of my daughter Valentina).

Richard Koci Hernandez made this video asking if “mobile photography has made us more reliant on tools than on our eyes”:

Sometimes you can find smart youtube comments. For example this guy wrote:

Hernandez makes a valid point - the image shouldn’t be defined by the camera it’s captured with. It’s a shame he had to spend five minutes saying what he could easily have said in five seconds. I turned off after that - couldn’t take the pretentiousness of his language any more.

[Read More]

I have always liked Craig Mod, since I read years ago his travelogue/review of the Panasonic GF1. He traveled to Himalaya, captured some great shot with this little camera, and wrote extensive and very well written thoughts about ‘gear’ – linking tech talk to excellent photography and interesting, deep commentary about how it feels to use a camera to capture your emotions. So far, this has been the best review of a camera that I’ve ever read. And it has been that review that inspired me to abandon (although only temporarily) DSLRs and got myself that little micro 4/3 jewel that was the GF1¹.

Last month two bikes were stolen from a certain garage in San Donato Milanese. Those were my mountain bikes; the garage, well that wasn’t mine¹.

And it was dead easy to open the garage for these gentlemen. Not only did they steal my two most precious bikes, leaving the city bikes untouched, but also my tire pump and all of my tools like allen keys and sockets etc. These gentlemen, they were really into bikes and knew their stuff pretty well. I hope they won’t be so stupid to go ride my bikes in Finale Ligure.

In other words: good reasons to avoid using “Ph.D” and other titles appended to your email.

From an article on the New York Times about the latest Spider-Man movie (the one filmed by Marc Webb):

Gwen Stacy asks Peter Parker if he likes branzino: you know, “Like, the fish?”.
Then she invites him to dinner, where everyone is saying “branzino”: Denis Leary (playing Gwen’s dad), Peter, Gwen again. We see a full branzino at the dinner table, neatly plated.
Why branzino? The film never says — it just offers up this delightful serving of unexpected weirdness.

[Read More]

Start here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-19208480

The story is about Usain Bolt and the snapshots he has taken using a camera borrowed from one of the sports photographers following the Olympics. But this is not about Bolt, it’s about these ‘professional photographers’ that you see in this shot.

Even if some time has passed from the last Olympics, everybody remembers the scene: Bolt runs, Bolt wins, then he goes on to perform the self-celebratory track walk, closely followed by a pack of photographers shooting full-speed their big professional Nikon and Canon rigs.

Street photography is real big now. All photographers do street photography. Everybody talks about it. But this is really getting on my nerves. I mean, these trivial shots of everyday life covered with fine-art pretensions given by a bland conversion to black and white – it’s really unnerving.

I am looking right now at 35mm Street, which is a very good example of this trend (for other similar examples just visit the countless examples of similar stuff on various Google+ groups or other similar venues).

Somewhere, behind the sad story of Lance Armstrong and his team mates doing EPO and other shit to dominate professional cycling, lies the reason behind my personal preference of a certain kind of sport.

Ask a MotoGP rider do drugs; or a mountain biker doing an downhill or enduro race; or a climber on a vertical wall in the Dolomites: none of these athletes will do drugs. That’s because the core of their activity more technique than physique.

Lately I’ve been reading quite a lof of articles about parenting. Most of them are book reviews but I did not read any of these books though¹, which could mean: (A) I’m a bit shallow, (B) stressed out New Yorkers, overproductive Chinese immigrants, rich Californians are not people that I feel entitled to give me directions on how to raise my kid (even though I acknowledge their superior education and intelligence and that their sons and daughters will surely rule the world).