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Picking Up the Camera Again
You know something is going wrong in your life if you are a photographer – of any level – and your camera has been sitting on the counter for over a month collecting dust, literally. That is exactly what has been happening and I still did not manage to confront my own feelings and issues – either in private or on my personal blog.
A couple of days ago I passed by Knowledge Village, where the Gulf Photo Plus 2011 event is taking place, on my way to work. Though I typically assist, this year I decided against doing so because of other commitments I have this week towards work and college. Add to that cumulated stress over the past few weeks and many things to catch up on and errands to run. When I passed by, however, I couldn’t help but have a heartache. I never expected I would react in this way, but it physically hurt me that I am not part of the event. My whole body was revolting against the idea that I am not taking part of this great annual photography event.
With that, I decided to take the rest of the week off (I work part time but had a lot of things to do this week) and pushed my college work further into the weekend. I charged the batteries, picked up the camera, and was ready to roll.
That was the best decision I made since the year started.
I already feel not only ecstatic – but empowered. Though my brain loves to play the self-defeating game when it comes to photography, this time I decided to shut up my brain and just click that shutter button away. Today I had the opportunity to take photos of the wonderful Olita Dubanevica before Claire Rosen‘s “Portrait & Fashion Photography” class. I will upload some of the images to the gallery, as well as the experience, but here’s a little preview of how they look like at the moment:
Tomorrow, Friday 11th, is PhotoFriday which promises to be a superb event full of talks by world class photographers. I am very confident they will be incredibly inspirational.
I will write another update after the event.
And We’re Back!
My apologies for the long delay in fixing the gallery; I have been swarmed with work left and right and could only dedicate so much time in setting this blog up again.
After much deliberation I decided to not continue using Pixelpost; as much as I loved the platform it was a headache to keep up with it as well as a separate photo blog identity. Now, finally, I have the photography blog and the gallery merged together, and with WordPress I can do even more stuff.
The best part about the redesign is taking the opportunity to redo some of the images into hopefully better ones.
The base skeleton structure is now ready and I will be gradually adding the rest of the images and functionalities with time. So stay tuned!
Photo Gallery Down
Last night I decided to do some clean up work for my blog, gallery and this site from the back-end of things and, as luck likes to have it, I apparently deleted the wrong information just before I was planning to do a backup.
I’m not particularly upset as the bulk of the site is in HTML things that took energy (like the about page and TTL) were not affected. What upset me though was the loss of all the comments. Everything can be eventually recovered except for the comments and THAT is what pissed me off.
The irony of things is that I am studying how to develop disaster recovery plans (for information security). I guess this happens to the best of us.
At any rate, all there is now is a photo of a cake for you to enjoy until everything is up and running again. Being busy with work and studies and some personal issues have robbed my time and attention from my camera and blogs. Still determined, though, I scheduled in a nice photo project I will make public soon once things are finalised. It is also a good time to consider keeping the Pixelpost CMS or try out something different now that I am starting from scratch.
Anyhoo – Happy Holidays!
Coffee Table – Update
Last month I mentioned the project regarding the coffee table book. It’s been a while and I feel I have been neglecting this photo blog a lot… Perhaps I should merge it with my personal blog although for the time being I am against that idea.
In any case, I haven’t been working much on submitting photos but now I have a deadline next week to finalize all the submissions and send them through. I had a look at a finalized concept of the book and I have to say I was mighty impressed. The other photographers that are also on board have done a magnificent job with their submissions. I feel privileged to be among such talents in this book. Their work is truly aspiring and marvelous and I cannot wait for the book to be sent to print.
The best learning experience so far is that I look at photos differently. When you have a certain theme in mind, you start viewing things in a completely different way. Revisiting old photos I have ignored and never considered working on made me realize potential I’m them given a particular theme focus. It has been a great exercise to take look at flat images and imagine how they would fit a particular theme with quick mental post-processing.
In any case, I have another project on the side I am doing for myself, a sort of experimentation with very modest types of candid photography. I’m not even using a DSLR for this, which make it quite interesting as I don’t intend to post process any image. I will be talking about this more in the coming weeks so stay tuned.
Showcasing My Work at Geekfest 5.0 Dubai
A couple or so weeks ago, I was invited by Alexander McNabb to showcase some of my photography at Geekfest 5.0, a social networking event that takes pride in it being unorganized in the traditional sense of the term. Unlike my usual self, I took this opportunity as a challenge to myself by telling Alex I would be showcasing never-seen-before photos that I have taken. I had one week to prepare 10 photos.
It was a great challenge for me as I was working full time during the week and had other engagements after work, leaving me no choice but to focus my energy on creating the images during the weekend. It was not easy, but here is what I learned: We tend to overlook great photos amidst all the clutter of no-go shots that we take. I have trained my eye, sadly enough, to look for the most perfect photo of the bunch – one with the right exposure and composition to minimize post-processing headaches. Not that I would divorce PhotoShop.
But here’s the catch: many photos that don’t necessarily meet “the requirements” are creatively solid but may need some more post processing. Some of them are even trickier if the composition is too off – mental cropping to find an image and story within the image retrains your eye to your purpose. The beauty of it, though while not utilizing the full resolution (and hence no big prints), it’s still good enough to put on the web and serves as a basis for me to better compose my shots down the road. It’s a learning experience.
In that regard I would like to thank Alex again for the opportunity, but more so to the fact that it made me come up with 10 good images I would have overlooked had I not been put to the test. I will be uploading the images to the site, but here’s all of them together for your viewing pleasure:
when time flies by
The nature of this blog is to showcase some of the work that I don’t usually put online for viewing. I believe that people wade through 800 different clicks to find one good shot. I plan, here, to show some of those shots, and a few of them, I believe, turn out much better than the ones I do end up putting online.
Still not sure about putting titles to posts… I wanted to create a theme… of a train ride, a journey with no destination… an ongoing train where I spend my days and nights taking photos of the scenery around me.
In any case, this post will have a tiny showcase, but the ones down the trail will have more photos and probably some tutorials or before and after images.
Because when I browse I only get to see the final result. So what I can probably do is show you the before and some of the afters, and the final pic I would probably choose to display on the gallery.
So that’s it for the brief intro. Enjoy the ride! I know I will.