Hamburg, Germany. December 6, 2011. All rights reserved.
Winter decided to visit Hamburg today with the first heavy snowfall tonight after some smaller showers already occurred earlier this week. I had my GF1 with me, happily taking a couple of snapshots after we finished a dinner snack at the Christmas market downtown.
Mönckebergstraße, Hamburg. Germany. November 2011.
I genuinely enjoy living in Hamburg. The city has posh, swanky areas that appeal to my sophisticated side and on the other hand, it’s laid back enough so I can feel good enough about myself leaving the apartment with a shabby, laid back look. Some areas of Hamburg certainly have that urban grittiness associated with the world’s top cities such as Paris, London, New York and Tokyo, but looking closely, I guess “Hamburg is not New York” – at least not when considering the Christmas Parade taking place during the weekends on Hamburg’s premier shopping mile, Mönckebergstraße.
Since the launch of Nikon’s new Nikon 1 camera system, public reactions have been very strong with a lot of negative feedback on blogs about the apparent shortcomings of Nikon’s new camera system.
imaging resource has conducted an exclusive interview with Masahiro Suzuki, General Manager R&D of Nikon. Asked about the image quality of Nikon’s new cameras, his answer surprises:
MS: We are quite confident that we achieved almost exactly the same quality as our DSLR.
DE: (surprised) The same quality as DSLRs.
MS: Yes…Please evaluate! (laughs)
DE: Yes, obviously, we’ll test and we’ll hold you to that! That’s very interesting, because this is a much smaller sensor, but you say the same quality.
MS: Mm-hmm.
I really doubt Nikon’s cameras will be able to live up to this claim.
The other day, the day I was writing this, I had an epiphany. It was not just about solving a problem that sprang to my mind just then, it was actually a revelation. And like ever so often, it was initiated by what somebody else pointed out.
Before I go on and dive into "the new shit that has come to light", let's put a pin into the above and let me tell you what's been constantly nagging in the back of my mind ever since I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my photography.
Photography as a hobby can be a blessing for anybody who is able to acquire and operate a camera. First achievements are easy enough to reach by sticking to easy motives and clichés. Really good photographs by hobbyists can often be the result of chance - misleading many to believe that one perfect image proves their talent. Most of these hobbyists have no focus as to what they photograph - every topic is their domain. There is no consistency in their "work", there is no style that can be associated to them and there is certainly no such thing as a portfolio. Ignorance is bliss as they say and as long as such hobbyists remain ignorant towards these shortcomings, they enjoy their hobby. When the ignorance vanishes, photography as a hobby is turning into a curse and the identity crisis looms.
What is my photographic work about? What should I focus on to improve my portfolio and develop a style of my own? Can my work be categorized in a genre, so that it's easier to attract people to my work and find like-minded photographers to learn from?
Coinciding with the release of Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, a photo-book that includes 165 of Steve McCurry’s most famous and iconic images, Phaidon Press have made a number of interviews available on Youtube, with Steve McCurry talking about some of the images. Highly recommended.
Although I consider myself not only talented but also interested in photography, I wouldn’t be able to name more than two or three renowned masters of the art, at least when it comes to street photography. Since this week, I can safely put another name on that list – Vivian Maier. She is yet to achieve the status of a renowned master, but given that her work is up to 60 years old and has just recently been discovered, she is probably halfway there.
Vivian Maier, born in New York City in 1926, passed away on April 21, 2009, just a little more than a year after her work has been purchased in auctions by at least John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein. Both of these gentlemen have since picked up the job of promoting late Maier’s work and rightfully so. Maier was not a professional photographer at the time. On her days off work, she roamed the streets of New York City and later Chicago to take thousands of street photographs, most of them with a medium format dual-lens Rollei. However, the strengths and impact of her work is evident and has been praised by many. In my own personal view, her work is as significant as the street photography of master of the art Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism.
I’m pleased to report that my submission to CBRE’s annual Urban Photographer of the Year contest has been ranked 2nd place. As this has been the first serious photography contest I participated in, I am extremely pleased with the outcome. Overall, from the thousands of images submitted, there are some great finalists. I especially like the image ranked third place by Aleksandar Tomulic from Croatia.
As the photography world has gone mostly digital, there remain some veterans who continue to expose on film. Although their numbers are becoming smaller year by year, some younger generation photographers – like me – are rediscovering the old art of exposing on film as the necessary equipment has never been cheaper on Ebay and the likes. Luckily, companies like Kodak are now offering films better than any available ever before, so shooting on film should be more fun than ever, right? Well, it’s true unless you take into account the enormous hassle that photographers have to go through when they travel with film.
Film, especially after it has been exposed already, is a very sensitive medium. It’s easy to ruin film. All it takes is too much heat, too much radiation, a critical amount of moisture and so on. While handling and taking care of film is usually no problem within the comfort zone of your home town it becomes much more inconvenient when you enter public transportation with all its modern, post 9-11 security requirements. One of the most dangerous sources of radiation that can harm your film are X-rays as you will encounter it in numerous scanning devices at all airports and many train and bus stations in many countries of the world. Also, covering a lot of distance inflight at great height will expose your film to a some radiation unless you shield it properly.
Like so many other photography addicts on the web, I am also an active user of Yahoo’s popular image service on the web, Flickr. Rather than just presenting my images in the solitude of my own web site(s), on Flickr I can share my work with like-minded people – and the best thing is that they are already there for the same thing, it’s as easy for them to find my images as it’s for me to find theirs.
To promote individual pictures and increase the likeliness that visitors take notice of individual pictures, Flickr introduced the concept of interestingness. Interestingness on Flickr is basically for images what Google’s Pagerank is for web sites. The crowning of a picture on Flickr is making it to Explore or be even featured in a Flickr blog post.
Since not every image can make it into Explore and there are so many good photographers around on Flickr, I decided to feature some each week and introduce them here. I’ve seen the concept on other web sites and I liked it. For example, The Guardian maintains a camera club section on their web site, introducing portfolios of selected Flickr members. Opposed to “sending” a portfolio to the Guardian’s editors at Camera Club, I want to share some of the Flickr contacts I discovered for myself – each for specific reasons.
This week’s contact is Adde Adesokan, also known as theblackstar on Flickr.