Photo Exploration # 33: Street

To me, photography is not about cameras or other complicated technical matters; it's about the way of seeing, and visualizing what you have in mind.

Photo Exploration # 30: Backyard Photography

It's not that hard to find an inspiration for your photography subject if you really look with you mind's eye.

A photo hunting doesn't have to be a trip to a far away or an exotic place.

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.

Meeting The "Photo Scavenger Hunt" Thematic Challenge: Things That Go Fast

Every now and then photographers need to create a challenge (in the form of a project of some sort) or meet a challenge posed by others to hone their photographic skills and keep their creative powers alive.

My post today is about meeting that kind of challenge.

Photo Scavenger Hunt is a photographic weekly thematic challenge initiated by a photo blogger friend of mine, Carrie Hayes of View of You Photography. For this week, the theme is "things that go fast" - and here is my interpretation of it.

How fast is fast? Well, I think that depends very much on what yard stick .you're using. A car can be fast, but it would seem slow compared to a rocket, for example. A bicycle may be slow when compared to a car, but it definitely is faster when compared with walking.

Fotografer kadang-kadang perlu menciptakan tantangan atau menjawab tantangan yang diberikan oleh orang lain untuk mengasah kemahiran fotografi dan kreatifitasnya.

Photo Exploration # 19: Bottles

Photo Exploration # 18: Urbanites 01

JAGAT FOTOGRAFI received KREATIV BLOGGER AWARD from a fellow photo blogger Laetitia of Malta Magic. Thanks a lot, Laetitia.

Photo Exploration # 17: Construction

My participation for this week's theme of Photo Scavenger Hunter: Construction.

This concrete skeleton is going to be an indoor tennis stadium of the Faculty of Sports Education of the Indonesia University of Education, Bandung.

Photo Exploration # 16: Whatever Moves Me ...

The Creative Processes Within:
I take photos of whatever moves me. Sometimes they are good, sometimes not so good, but very rarely are they bad. No, no, no, ... I'm not trying to say that I never fail. I certainly have had my own fair share of bad photographs if the "accepted" norms of what makes good and bad photographs are used. What I mean by "I rarely have bad photographs" is that no matter what a judge in a photography contest or the viewing public would have said about my photographs, I would still feel good about them if I feel some sort of satisfaction when I took those photos. And that kind of satisfaction comes from the good feeling I feel about following my "instict," following what "moves me from within".

I can't always name or explain what that is that makes my visual instinct tickles when that is happening. But the photos usually speak for themselves, after they were created. Quoting them (the photos), sometimes it is the convergence of lines and geometrical elements that make a pleasing or curious composition. At other times, it's a fleeting moment that begged to be frozen in a frame, or the appealing plays of light and shadows, or colors striking the visual cords within. Whatever happens, I don't usually have an overt consciousness about what the pictures will "speak" about.

Having said all that, however, I must also admit that things have not always been like that. There were times in my love affairs with photography when my visual intincts were mixed or confused with my conciousness of who the audience of my photographs would be. I tried hard to make "good" photographs that would somehow please my audience (imagined or real) by conforming to the accepted norms about what a good photograph should be - in the choice of subjects, the rule of composition, and other technical tids and bits. But did I feel happy? Successful?

Sometimes, I did. But the constraints the conscioiusness I had about my audience placed upon my "creative shoulders" felt too heavy and made me feel disoriented about where I wanted to go with my photography. So, I had to let it go. It (losing my audience and audience's approval) was not easy, but I'm glad I did it. Now I feel freer to pursue whatever moves me from within.

October 13, 2008
Eki Qushay Akhwan

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 # 14: High Angle

Skywatch Post 01 (NT)

This photograph is for this blog's participantion is Skywatch Friday. To see other participants' photographs, please check here.

Street Photography # 4: Children's World

Children live in their own world.

It is not ours.
Ours is a world of thoughts and consciousness,
of works and complex interplay,
theirs is a world of imaginations,
of freedom and play.

We teach them to become us.
Do we not want to learn to become them?
to be imaginative,
to be at play and enjoy,
to be free and feel the joy?

Eki Qushay Akhwan

Photo Exploration # 13: A Place Where Knowledge Seats