La Aldea Irreductible
I've found some of my pictures in a Youtube video that was created by someone who writes what I believe is an art blog. I cannot tell too much about it, since it is written in Spanish. My Spanish roommate did me a favor and translated the original post for me: Turns out that the author of this blog introduces a Swedish singer (Anna Ternheim) to his readers. So this video basically plays one of her songs while the visual part is a slideshow with my images.
The music is beautiful, by the way. About the use of my images: I think it's always nice to see that someone likes what you are doing, and it's a curious thing to see how something else is created with it. Whether the music fits well with the images is another question. I thought the poppy colors would work better with something else, but maybe that's just me.
Here is the link to the original post.
Cagil
The Quest for the Perfect Walk-Around Lens
For a long time I thought a good walk-around lens is a lens with a large focal range in order to be prepared for all kinds of situations. Because I didn't want to sacrifice image quality I started to carry around the super heavy and bulky Canon 24-70 mm 2.8 from Canon. Now I decided I don't want to carry much gear anymore and keep my photography simple. Here are the obvious things I observed:
- As more gear you carry as a bigger deal it becomes taking it with you.
- As bigger the deal becomes as rarer are you bringing it with you.
- As less you have it with you as more opportunities for good photos you miss.
Instead of bringing a backpack full of glass everywhere, I decided to get myself a Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens and leave all the other glass at home, ha! Fact is, if you want to shoot situations, you cannot waste time with zooming anyway. You probably want to frame them in the way you are seeing them right at that moment. 30 mm on a APS-C sized sensor makes 48 cm, so here we go. Thanks to Mr. Beckerman for bringing my attention to this lens.
I also found a nice inconspicuous photo bag which can be worn over the shoulder or as belt-bag. I did a long Google image-search for such a - not necessarily photo - bag and ended up on the B&H website...how funny. It seems that the two main groups concerned about bags are females and photographers. Here is a link to the bag. In there should be enough space for the camera, the 30mm lens, and an ultra-wide-angle, which I mostly use for architecture and HDR stuff. I'm thinking about doing some long-term traveling next year, so this is some kind of preliminary adjustments towards going light and easy.
Back to the lens. I took it for a walk on South Street (in Philly) last Sunday. About the colors: I'm a compulsive image tweaker, thanks for indulging me :-)
Copyright Disclaimers
Today I made an archaeological finding on my hard disk that I thought would be worth a post. When I started this website I had the idea of having copyright disclaimers in all kinds of languages. Because people at my workplace are so international, I thought I would ask them to write a disclaimer for me in their language and photograph them holding it. I think I followed the idea only two days and then got distracted by other things. Later on when I realized how many of my not-yet-photographed candidates already left Princeton, I got a little discouraged and dropped the idea.
I think this is Catalan:
Italian:
Taiwanese:
Ukrainian:
And here we have an italien helping me out with Swedish - which is a bit weird.
Photography – Video Convergence
In the past few days more and more articles came to my attention that mentioned the merge of still image cameras and video cameras in their headlines. I'm not too much into gadgets so I ignored all those articles. Everything merges all the time: cameras, phones, music players, etc.. I simply find it tyring to jump on new technological gimmicks. Most things are obsolete before they are established and when ever cameras are merged with something small and gadgetry, the image quality is terrible, so why bother?
My preferred source for photo-talk is Dave Beckerman's blog, he is an excellent blogger and I read him daily. So did I today and when reading one of the comments on a recent post, I found a link that ultimately reminded me that the still image/video merge is serious.
With 'serious' I mean quality. One of Canon's upcoming digital SLRs seems to be having outstanding video capabilities. What the heck!? It's an SLR!
If you click the link below you will see a little movie that was made by Vincent Laforet with a pre-production Canon EOS 5D II. Nothing in this video has been post-processed.
He also shows still images taken with the camera during production. If you have a close look at the un-processed ISO-1600 and ISO-3200 images, one can see that the 21 mega pixel sensor hardly produces any noise. I don't like tech-talk too much, but this is big.