Photo

The long Norwegian September is a period of the year when I’m still very much in holiday-mode, with my skin still burning from the southern italian sunshine, and at the same time dreading the dark winter ahead. It is a period when my congenital hatred for office life and rituals reach the highest peak; it is a period where all these first-world problems are channeled into the research of a new camera to play with¹.

[Click here for italian version.]

I have kept this yellow notepad for I don’t know how long.

It serves the basic purpose of taking notes but it’s tough and water resistant too. Real geologists use this kind of notepad when they’re out in the field to record events, log rocks, sketch outcrops, maybe draw funny faces too.

I am not a real geologist but I have had the opportunity from time to time to visit interesting places. I thought this notebook would be ideal to collect what I call my geolandscapes.

How can you capture the wind on a photograph? How can you make the viewer feel the cold or the warmth of a place? How can you make landscape photography communicate the sense of a place? Can a photo be a substitute for the simple, raw emotions that one feels when he’s out in the woods or in the mountains?

These are the things that lately have been on my mind. I’m pretty sure it all started with something that Andrew Molitor wrote on his brilliant blog. He keeps bashing on these points but right now I will not search those two or three relevant posts but here’s the gist of it (or more correctly, my interpretation):

Wedding photography is something like newborn photography; cheesy, kitsch and very very false. Obviously I’m talking about the kind of wedding and newborn photography which is most in vogue nowadays (i.e., the first hits you get when googling these keywords).

I just happened to read Milnor’s blog that featured an interview with some wedding photographer I didn’t know – and i still don’t know – but what was interesting was the little background story Milnor wrote so I thought about something:

the climb

celebrations

the cross-country skier

Forget what I said in previous posts. I may still have some sympathies for Laroque and Simpson and Johnston but I have reached a place where there are no more photographic heroes for me on the web.

Unless you count Andrew Molitor, of course¹.

There are so many wonderful ideas on his blog, and once you start reading you realize what’s missing from the internet these days; the excitement that I still remember from the days when the web was young, when you could discover brilliance without the taint of money-making.

I wanted to get a Leica this time. For real.

You know Leica: stupidly expensive cameras that are more likely to be kept in a closet or worn like a piece of jewellery than actually used (it wasn’t like that before, when actual journalists back in the fifties used it as a fast, robust little camera to be used in the field).

Anyway, even if now they seem to be more of a fashion statement, I have always liked the impression of solidity, their simplicity, and that funky way of setting the focus¹. But I would have never considered one for real if I had not played with the original Monochrom; that really changed something, the simple pleasure of using and holding this rather large, deceiptively simple and “dense” camera changed somehow my perception of Leicas. I will be honest and declare it right now that none of this matters when it comes to photography; but I’m talking about something else here, I’m talking about very elementary pleasures that are tangentially related to the actual making of photographs; the same pleasure that I get from using bycicles or a Faber-Castell pencil for example.

I have had this Nikon FM2 lying around in my house for some time now. It has not seen much action though.

You see, I started taking photos when I was sixteen or seventeen with a Yashica FX3, and I don’t really have any kind of nostalgia for those times when I had to wait days before realizing I missed a certain shot, or that I focused on that insignificant detail behind my subject.

The only type of competition I have ever enjoyed is two-wheeled racing; I have raced motorbikes and mountain bikes in the past (and I will probably continue to do so once this daddy thing wears off).

In this sort of competition there is no subjectivity; if you go faster than everybody else, you finish first. If you are slow, if you make mistakes, you finish last¹. I have always been a middle-pack kind of guy. But I still enjoyed racing even after finishing behind elders and youngsters, males or females – if somebody is faster than me that is pretty darn objective and I respect that.

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.

This is the second part of my selection of photographs from Eastern Turkey.

The first part features cityscapes and city dwellers and people in general.

This second part is all about landscapes and geology which hopefully would interest even those of you who are not into geology. After all, geology has at its core a certain fascination with the natural beauty you find in nature – but sometimes those who work in the field seem to neglect this simple fact and then geology can become truly boring.

Last May I went to Eastern Turkey to see some geology. I also had the opportunity to hit the streets of cities that were unknown to me.

I have collected my favourite photographs in two separate posts¹. This is part 1, featuring street portraits, cityscapes and other stuff I liked while walking on the streets of Adana, Kahramanmaras and Elazig.

Part 2 is all about landscapes and geology which hopefully would interest even those of you who are not into geology.

A brief interlude to note down a couple of things.

I follow only one podcast, and that’s On Taking Pictures. As the name says, it’s about photography, and in one recent Q&A episode they kindly answered a question I have made; what’s cool however is their comment on my name which I’d like to remember for the future – skip to the 1h18'28" mark:

The second thing is about Flickr: they have recently published a collection of baobab’s photographs and have included one of my photos from my Madagascar honeymoon trip¹.

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.

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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.