Confidant of Nature !
“The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.”
The Local News Broadcast…!!!
Out there in the country, this is the fastest, not always the most reliable (actually a bit like Fox News at times with the small differences that these grannies are not misinforming always in a deliberate manner) and definitely one of the best way to keep yourself up to date with the local breaking news. In a small village were the newspapers get at least a week after the publishing date, and in most of the houses they watch some sadly entertaining tv channel, it is really worth taking a walk with this sweet old ladies just to find out about the village priest and his mistress or about the neighbor’s daughter and the mayor’s son, or even about the new candidate in the coming elections for the Mayor’s seat.
Roads to Nowhere … !!!
And I mean that literally …Roads to Nowhere…!!! Yesterday I spent my whole day in the middle of nowhere and these were a few of the roads going there…!!! Small little villages looking almost forgotten by the rest of the world were even the mobile signal is so scarce that I had to go up on the highest hill in the area to use my 21st century technology. I had even bought the only one bottle of water available in the local shop. So…yes….they were just Roads to nowhere…!!!
High Dynamic Range – Love it or Hate it?
For quite a while I was a bit “afraid” of HDR photography. Maybe because I was just at my beginnings in photography and I couldn’t quite understand it and also because I could see a lot of photographers just overdoing it and the resulting images looked rather artificial.
Browsing the net one day, looking for all sorts of photo tips and tutorials, I stumbled upon some beautiful HDR images created by an amazing photographer called Philipp Klinger. My interest being awakened ,I slowly discovered that this is a very old concept in photography dating back to 1850 when Gustave Le Gray ,also called “the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century”, pioneered the idea of using several images shot at different exposures to fix a too-extreme range of luminance.
High dynamic range imaging original developing is attributed thou to Charles Wyckoff who’s detailed pictures of nuclear explosions were published on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1950s.
In time the desirability of HDR has been recognized but it wasn’t until the introduction of digital photography , the rising popularity of digital cameras as well as the increase in computing power, development of photo editing software and other technological advances that high dynamic range imaging really took off.
The photos in this post are two of my high dynamic range images that I worked on when I found my interest for this technique and I was trying to learn and understand it. Even thou I did got carried away and “over-HDRed” them I still love them as working on these two images made me comprehend and appreciate the entire set of techniques that goes into HDR creation .
Multiverse ( 2nd Part)
On a comment made by HeyesPhoto on my previous “Multivese” post he asked what kind of oil I used to get those patterns. I didn’t think a lot about that question then because I didn’t really thought that the actual oil used would make a difference . But then it made me curious…I kept thinking about it…Would a different oil give a different result…? If one has a higher density than the other will I be able to see the difference in the images? So I set on checking out their densities and found out that olive oil has a smaller density than the sunflower one (olive oil – aprox 800 kg/m3 and sunflower aprox 920 kg/m3). Finding these results made me give it one more try at this series of photos as I was now convinced that I might just get visibly different results.
After finishing the shoot and taking a long and inquisitive look and the resulting photographs…I am not that convinced anymore that the oil used visibly changed the photos. I used different colors this time and slightly higher shutter speed…also it is impossible to get the same pattern…but these are the only changes I see. Do you see any change in the images that can be attributed to the oil used ?
Multiverse
I recently got a burst of curiosity and had a quick look into what scientists are calling Multiverse. It is a hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise everything that exists and can exists like space, time, matter and energy (that brief definition alone gave me a headache…but I still find this theory very interesting and I am forcing my brain to understand it) . This also implies the notion of parallel universes, a theory which has proven to not only be a very good subject for a countless number of books and movies that captured our imagination, but also a theoretical possibility.
After I took all these shots and had a proper look at them, the first few thoughts that popped in my mind were space-time, universe, parallel universes.
Dr. Michio Kaku explaining the Multiverse Theory
Just a Thought
I took these shots about a week back. It started with just fooling around with my camera, playing with the settings and just trying to keep entertained in some way. I was thinking for a while now about a photo about money,and I even tried a few in the past, but I was calmed down a bit in my enthusiasm because of the stereotype of it all. You can see almost at every corner a money shot (literally). But my sarcastic imagination didn’t allowed me to remove from my memory the “philosophical” questions : “are money the root of all evil?” and “can money bring happiness?”.
So i started analyzing yet again this trough my brain and almost caused my glial cells to fail but at the end, after managing to cool off all that electrical activity with couple of glasses with icy cold tap water,I have succeeded in coming up with couple of conclusions. The first question I found it to be a bit moronic ; why? because people are the root of all evil, with absolutely no exceptions. It is that simple that whom ever came up with this and realized for the first time that nothing but us, the “supreme race”, are the root of all evil, didn’t actually needed to be some sort of genius, he just needed to use his mental capacity to a bare minimum required from a human being.
Second question is a bit more complex and can draw more answers. But in my humble opinion, money can certainly be an added bonus to happiness, but it can never bring it, at least not on their own. They can just help a bit to kick start this feeling we are all hoping to understand.
Now the image bellow is probably very far away from the though I tried to put on a short and very modest text above, having in common just the money, but yet this was my wired and meaningless photographic conclusion. Also helps to keep the Black & White continuity of my posts.
Feeling Blue
A Poem
Tell me, if I caught you one day
and kissed the sole of your foot,
wouldn’t you limp a little then,
afraid to crush my kiss?
***poem by Nichita Stanescu***
Art…?????
I have recently watched a documentary were Roger Scruton (writer and philosopher) raises the issue of the importance of beauty an the lack of it in modern arts. That made my mind wonder a bit around the obvious questions… How far can we push ART?(in my case photography)… Can any image be called art…?…there is really no more beauty in modern art (or at least in most of it…)? It might just be that our perception of beauty changed a bit mostly due to the lives we are more or less forced to surrender to by the society of today! With those thoughts disturbing my winter frozen neurons I wanted to force a bit the limit and create some sort of “modern art”. Starting from this idea and with inspiration from the quote “eyes are the window to the soul” (or “…the mirror of the soul”, there are more variations to this quote) my intellect and imagination quietly baked for a couple of days, I have taken countless photos and managed to come up with the image bellow.This is no special image, no special techniques were used other than some Photoshop tweaking; nothing really amazing.Is just something that makes me think about the existence and the mystery of my own soul.
So my question is: ***IS THIS IMAGE ART…?*** and ***WHY?***
I would be quite honored if you would give it a few minute and write down a comment with your opinion and help me find an answer…!!!
Snowy Valentines – My Hometown ***VASLUI***
Snapshots of a Beautiful and white valentines Day in Vaslui.
Dearest However:
I wish I could say that the poem that I have chosen to share it along with this images bellow was mine. Unfortunately it isn’t…!!! I couldn’t find the author – it was actually published on an online forum with unknown author. Hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.
Dearest However:
What would I like to know?
Nothing less than the proportions of flesh between your thoughts.
When time equals our beliefs both time and belief will evaporate
and space will be measured in terms of your eyes in mine.
I have no idea where space finds you tonight.
I haven’t the time to believe in our wishes
but we are one as organs of God and obviously in love with
the ephemeral positions of our bodies within bliss.
No doubt we will meet again when bliss can no longer be mistaken for a
shudder.
We must not take the world very seriously since we both seem to enjoy a
romance without kisses
and can laugh at the poets when they charm us.
You make me remember that life is hollow within us and without us
yet solid in the space inbetween.
I’ve made of you a picture of caring,
that was easy,
I would like to step closer to grief
and know that you’re watching.
As it stands, ours is a relationship between fantasy and Truth.
Regardless of our wishes,
it wills us to be so much more and much less.
But where are you tonight?
We have entrusted locks and keys to one another
and Christmas is looming…
our presents are panting,
the trees are bending with the weight of our ornaments.
I am yours.
You have everything.
All is peace.
