Painting with Light

Photography after all is writing or painting with light. The camera is your brush, the digital sensor and/or the film are your canvas, and the light is your medium. Just like painting, what you want to do with them is up to you. Just as there are many painting syles, so there are photography.

No Title - NT

Sometimes it's best to leave a photograph without a title and let the audience be free to interpret it as they wish just as sometimes we - photographers - do not have the explicit reason why we take that photograph other than because we like it and strongly feel about it.

Peanut World: Photo Hunting Reconsidered

If you are not a full time photographer, chances are that there are times when you just feel that you don't have the time to really go out and hunt for and make photographs. But think again. Photographs are everywhere for you to pick up at will. All you need to do is change your paradigm about a photograph and the way you think about it.

All things can be photographed. Good or bad is the next question. But good or bad are also categorical. There are general criteria for good photographs (although many would not care to think about the bad ones). And even then, these filters don't apply across the board. What's good in one may not be that good in another. Three things, I think, play a very significant role: genre, taste, and cultural setting.

I'll safe the lengthy discussion of those somewhat more complicated arguments for later time. For now, let's get back to the basic premise: anything can be photographed. And that anything is anywhere as long as there is light, for photography is impossible without light. And as I said earlier, all you need to do is change your attitude. Once that happens, you can start exploring - using whatever you have and know about photograph-making.

Snapshooting may be the first step. Let it go. Release your creative energy. Kick out all inhibitions about going happy and shooting at will. Photography is cheap now that the digital technology has made it possible to take and discard photographs without much financial consequences. Once you get heated up and the creative energy is overflowing, start paying attention to details, elements, light, and what's possible under the circumstances. That - in my experience - is when satisfying photographs (I'm not talking about good here) begin to come your way.

All those "procedures" can take place anywhere and anytime. The "Peanut World" above was made at the peak of boredome at the workplace. It was a short round of snapshooting before I began to focus and "saw" and "picked" satisfying photographs.

©Eki Akhwan 2009
PS. I did nothing to edit the photograph, except turning it into black and white and resizing it. The 16:9 ratio format is camera-original.

Blue-Dotted Tap

Sometimes we pass an object too many times before it attracts our attention.

Ordinary objects do not in themselves have the "mouth" to shout and tout themselves to us. But they do speak in their own ways and frequencies. So, it's us who have to adjust our "ears" to their language and frequencies.

This kind of fine-tuning is not a one shot thing. It's a process. It's continuous. It never does take place automatically. There has to be a deliberate attempt to make our "ears" capable of catching their whispers, their voices, however muted they are.

I know it's strange to talk about photography in auditory terms. But change the word "mouth" with light or sight, and "ears" with eyes or vision, then you have all you need to do with image-making.

Hodge-podge

You might want to smirk (smugly smile) at this photo: a color snapshot of a mixture of things that seems unrelated except for the fact that they are up in the sky, billboards of some sort, and a jumble of cables and poles.

Yes, it's obviously not that kind of photos that you'd see in an art gallery (at least not one that I've ever seen) or one that has won a photo contest; it's not even a photo of human interests or of a beautiful scene that's so pleasant to look at in an instant. But I like it, if only for the sheer joy it gave me in making it.

It was a spontaneous flow that moves from they eye to my heart and senses and fingers and that split-second time that it took to freeze it in this frame. It probably feels like Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment, only that it is not about an unfolding event whose minutiae elements of motion are so crucial to follow, of which only one is the maker of the decision of whether it is a successful or fail picture (hence the decisive moment). It's just IT, and I like it.

The unrully lines, the rigid geometry of the rectangles and squares, the colors ... Without realizing it in the first place, I might have sensed a harmony in this seemingly hodgy-podgy scene. I was walking, pointing my camera at some other things on the street when I looked up and spontaneously moved my arms and finger to freeze what I saw, forgetting the other things I was so intent on finding and capturing just seconds before.

101 - Path of Interests

Photo Exploration # 34: Space Within Space

Space, they say, does not have the boundaries; it's three-dimensional, and the very thing that makes it possible for objects and events to exist. Can that thing we see in the mirror be considered space?

If space is boundless, then it must be. But is the space within the mirror three-dimensional? Is it possible for objects and events to exist - to take place - within it?

Then, there is of course the question of the photograph itself. Is it space? If we stick to the physicist's definition of linear space, it can't be. It has boundaries, the frames. And it's only two-dimensional. However, the photographic "space" does make objects and events exist or can be created to exist.

Let's also consider space's fourth dimension that forms a continuum with time and hence is called spacetime. Now you have the very thing - contentious as it might be - that defines our perception of the universe.

Welcome to space within space.

Shadow #005: C.C.

JAGAT FOTOGRAFI is participating in Shadow Shot Sunday.

Monochrome Shadow: Reaching The Unreachable

JAGAT FOTOGRAFI is participating in Shadow Shot Sunday and Monochrome Monday. Please check out the links to see other participants' photos.

Monochrome Shadow (Shadow #005)

Participating in:
Shadow Shot Sunday &
Monochrome Monday

Please follow the link to check other participants' photos.

Photo Exploration # 32: Structure 001

Photo Exploration # 31: Steely Cold

As cold as steel?

Photo Exploration # 25: Twisted Time

In a digital world, anything can be twisted, including time and, of course, this photograph.

Can a digitally manipulated image like this still be called photography? Many would say YES. They'd say that as long as the basis is still a photograph - an image created by a camera - a digitally manipulated image should still belong to photography. There are others, of course, who disagree. Call them purist or whatever, they do have their own valid arguments about what they believe photography should be.

Photo Exploration # 24: I still have yet to understand

What's the limit of an exploration?

I'd say, it's understanding. For as long as we have not reached a desirable and satisfactory understanding of what we set out to explore in the first place and of the answers found that have since generated more questions, that exploration shall not come to an end. Exploration in this sense, therefore, is the essence of our life's journey on its own. It is a never-ending quest to understand, to quench the thirst we were born with.

Our exploration - our life's journey - may consist of smaller, more manageable sub-explorations. Together, they form a stream - a huge stream - of life energy that keeps us moving, living. When that stream stops flowing, that is to say when our quests for answers have stopped, then that's when life ends.

This photo is part of that smaller sub-exploration of mine of the wonder of the visual world; how I come to like what I see, what moves me to cast the spell of camera magic and freeze it in a frame, and how that interplay of the inner and outer worlds in that simple act of pressing the button of the camera gives me so much satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) to me.

Please do forgive me for these visual and verbal ramblings ...

Eki Qushay Akhwan

Photo Exploration # 22: Small Things and Affinities to Visual Elements

To me it's still a mystery why some people (read: photographers) are more attracted to a particular type of visual stimuli. Some of them obviously have more affinity to landscape, some to human expressions or lines and geometry, and others to other visual elements such as light, colors, textures, and other more subtle hues of image-making that not everybody can even "see".

I understand that people with greater visual intelligence pay attention to all those elements. But evidence also shows that their attention is not directed equally to every one of them.

As a photographer, I have learned to feel comfortable with different subject matters with my camera. I can do landscape as comfortably as portraiture, architecture and abstract as dexterously as street photography, but when it comes to visual stimuli, I think lines and geometry are what I am attracted to the most. My reactions to them are almost always spontaneous - it's like I can see them even when they are not tangibly manifested.

By the way .........

I "discovered" the above photo at the reception desk of a car and motorbike wash. The encounter was brief and my reaction to the visual stimulus was spontaneous. As I would normally do in such an encounter, I explored the scene, taking several pictures of it without thinking much. I did not know why I was attracted to this object, but when I saw the results, I think it's mostly the lines, the curves, and the geometry of it that had triggered my instinctive photographic reaction in the first place.

Photo Exploration # 20: Platonic Reality

I said, whatevery moves me.

Like a hammer striking hard at the senses, the scene moved me. I tried to capture it from different angles but, to my frustration, none seemed to work out. Such is the elusive power of photographic reality. Light was fast fading - and so was this fleeting drama of the shadow.

Platonic Reality, the title of this post, is inspired by the Cave Allegory or Cave Metaphor that Plato used in The Republic (Book 7, 514a - 520a), in which he narrated a fictional conversation between Socrates (his teacher) and his brother Glaucon. In the dialogue, Socrates introduced the idea that what many people take to be reality could in fact be just an illusion.

Confined from birth in a cave and forced to face the wall where shadows of the "real" things are projected, the prisoners who inhabit the cave (that's us?) have only seen shadows all their lives and hence they have come to belive that the shadows are real and that they are reality.

Photo Exploration # 19: Bottles

Photo Exploration # 15: Colors

"There is a clear difference between a photograph in which there happens to be colour, and one in which the colour works to make the image what it is."

(Freeman, Michael.Digital Photography Expert: Colour. Cambridge, England: ILEX, 2005)

The legitimacy of color as a subject of a photograph has been debated among photographers for a long time. For those who are against it, the concentration on "beautiful colors in pleasing relationships" is considered to be one of the two "categories of failure" of color photography (Szarkowski in Freeman, 2005: 133). Though "pleasing," an image that makes color its (primary) subject is considered by some art critics as a photograph "in search of a subject," or a "formless" photograph (op cit.).

This is the Indonesian version of the above text:
Warna sebagai subjek foto yang sah telah lama diperdebatkan di kalangan para fotografer. Bagi yang tidak setuju terhadap warna sebagai subjek foto, konsentrasi pada "warna-warna yang indah" dianggap sebagai salah satu dari dua "kategori kegagalan" fotografi warna. Meskipun tampak "indah," sebuah foto yang menjadikan warna sebagai subjek utamnaya dianggap oleh sebagian kritikus seni sebagai foto yang "kehilangan subjeknya" atau foto yang "tak berbentuk".

This is what the above photograph looks like when it is desaturated. The "pleasing" effect, as you can see, is gone.

Photo Exploration # 13: A Place Where Knowledge Seats

Photo Exploration # 12: Home