Signals

Understandable, originally uploaded by azMattic.

Ten months ago I decided to take a break from blogging to focus on how I might successfully switch careers after leaving my translation gig in Taiwan to return to my hometown of New York, NY. To make a long story short, I've applied to a few graduate programs and if I'm accepted, I'll be working towards an MFA in Graphic Design starting this fall.

It was a month or so after the last post that I picked out "Understandable" by azMattic. I thought won't it be clever how life right now is giving me conflicting signals, and this photo features a whole mess of signals pointing in different directions? I thought it was poetic back then, and looking at it now I feel that it's still a powerful image. Part of what grabs me is the sense of tension between wire and sky and also how the wires seem to cascade down the image, lending the scene an added sense of scale and distance. The wires remind us of how grounded we are to the earth, to the network of electrical lines and telecommunication fibres that tether us together in the techno-centric modern world.

So on that note, I say hi, again. Welcome to the blog. I hope to update once a week with a new favorite from Flickr. In addition, the tone and structure of subsequent blog posts will likely continue to shift in order to accommodate my persisting shortcomings.

Bokeh

let me see, originally uploaded by kestra_400.

Bokeh describes the blurry quality of out of focus areas in a photograph. At large apertures, in the right settings, sometimes the light is transformed to resemble little Christmas ornaments. That's bokeh. Different lenses all have their own characteristic bokeh. In some of the flickr groups you can run across lens arguments debating the "good" or "bad" bokeh of one lens versus another. This post isn't about what makes good bokeh, though. I don't know anything about that.

I'm just here to show you this photo and tell you that kestra_400 is one of a band of photographers that does beautiful low light/available light photography. And he does it on film. My own experience shooting film is limited to my Holga and an old, crumbling Nikon that I have in no way wrapped my head around yet so there's not much insight I can offer into the way this photo was shot unfortunately. All I know is that it's not always easy to find places that bokeh beautifully.

I wonder if it has to do with the city. Many of the most beautifully executed photographs that feature predominant bokeh are set in the metropolises of Eastern Asia: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei. It could just be my affinity towards tiny points of shiny light shooting out of the darkness. Drop one sharp subject in there, and I'm pretty much guaranteed to drop my jaw in return. I really like how in this shot the person in the foreground seems to be peering into the distance, admiring the lights just like we are.

It's great how there not only a variety in the colors, but also intensity, and nature of the blurred out lights. There are the blue solid lights that are clumping at the bottom, a similar clump to the left of orange lights, a row of red lights coming down diagonally, and then translucent-seeming bubbles of yellow and dark red floating up to the top. Staring at those lights, I can't help but guess what I'm looking at. I try to piece together a scene in my mind, but everything dissolves as soon I start to make any sense of it.

Getting By

活著‧To Live, originally uploaded by Tiac.

Tiac is a really great photographer on Flickr and I always look forward to seeing updates on his page. The coolest thing about his work is that it's all done on a Sony compact digital camera. He has mentioned setting white balance to cloudy to get more warmth and upping saturation and contrast levels to the max. The results are really astounding. He captures ultra colorful images of the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit system and vicinity.

Here, Tiac has titled this photo "To Live", drawing our attention to the rubbish collector, picking up discarded cardboard on his tricycle just to get by and make a living. The crop is perfectly suited for the subject, straight and narrow. The arrows on that wall then further emphasize the straight grind that must be this man's life. There's nothing to do but keep going forward, on and on. I really like the angle and proportions of wall to street. That foreground line is a nice reinforcement of how confined that man is to his path.

I wonder if the decision was his own to make his living this way. What were the circumstances that led to this? There are quite alot of people in the city of Taipei who are in this line of work, so maybe it's as good a life as the next alternative, opening a soup stall or cleaning the escalators in the subway stations. It does seem like strenuous work, though. Hauling flattened cardboard boxes around day in and day out, rain or shine must be draining on the soul. Or maybe it's just what life is. It's work and he gets by. I bet there are people in fancy shoes and fancy suits that are mentally in the exact same place as this guy is.

Presence

Magnum photographer Simon Wheatley, originally uploaded by martin_fuchs.

I don't know anything about this man, other than the fact that he is a photographer. Like the wedding portrait I blogged on a few weeks back, I am amused to see a photographer so well photographed. I like how the subject's intensity is captured underneath the harsh sunlight. The lighting is far from ideal, and yet, the results look great. When I look at a portrait like this, I realize that my own work has got a long way to go. I can't even begin to guess how this shot looks so clean.

Maybe it's as simple as just telling a person to stand facing the sun, a "look at me", and then snap. But something tells me it's not that easy. Problems normal people have with a shot like this are nowhere to be found: washed out/overexposed forehead & nose, dark clothing blending in with dark background, blown out sky in background, lack of detail under harsh lighting, etc.

The execution of this shot is just spot on. The crop and composition are great. There's no superfluous space above the head, and the positioning of the subject 1/3 of the way into the frame is classic and works well. The crazy steel ladder and beams to the right strangely work nicely to balance out the rest of the photo. The skyline of the city in the back then grounds the photo and gives us an interesting background. This is a great example of how landscape orientation is just as suited for portraiture as portrait orientation is.

Disembodied

Chang Le Road, Shanghai, originally uploaded by Susu.

One really exciting element of photography is discovery. I'm not sure if anyone ever thinks "today, I'm going to shoot mannequins." Plastic torsos can be categorized underneath found objects. It's not like nature or landscape, where you start with an idea of what is beautiful or interesting, and then go out and find it. Broken down body parts like the ones above are definitely something you find on accident, perhaps on the way to the corner store. This is why cameras must never be left behind on even the shortest of errands. Out of toothpaste? Better get your camera. Who knows what's out there waiting to be discovered.

I would have loved to be confronted with a window display like the one above. I feel that the gestures and positioning of those arms and legs really speak to me. In the front, oblivious to its own state of disrepair, a pair of slender legs poses daintily. Below it, a figure that has not only lost its head, but has fallen over heels lies in an awkward position. Behind, a final poised half-figure with back turned to us pretends to restore order to clumps of discarded rubbish. Whoever threw these leftover mannequins in this heap must have had a real eye for composition.

I also like the starkness of the bright white, clearly defined, figures surrounded by darkness. This is all that remains of some forgotten boutique or department store: an eerie reverie. It reminds me of Shelley's Ozymandias that thoroughly unimpressed me in middle school, and later proved to be poignantly appropriate when used in Alan Moore's Watchmen (hopefully not overly melodramatic when inserted here):

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Crossing

the city, originally uploaded by abre/tus/ojos.

Lighting is everything. Just like how a beautiful model can be ruined by poor lighting, a bustling intersection can be reduced to a static mess of indistinct blobs when shot without consideration of the light source. With the right eye, however, and careful attention paid to natural available light, a simple scene (above) of people crossing the street can be transformed into something magical.

What I love about the lighting here is that the low angle of the sun casts the shadows of the pedestrians down onto the striped crosswalk, adding strips of dark, textureless shadow to the alternating bands of bright reflective white and gritty black asphalt. It almost looks like the white stripes are rays of light stretching down from the upper left. And whereas I might have blindly just tried to shoot silhouettes of back-lit pedestrians, abre/tus/ojos has chosen at angle about 45 degrees from perpendicular to the sun's rays, that has captured the pedestrians with a thin slivers of side-lit highlight. It's just perfect.

Tilting the camera slightly down, he's cropped out any potentially distracting sky or buildings. What is left is a full frame of crosswalk. With the amazing highlights, each person is discreet and clearly visible. I like the sharpness of the forms, making it seem as if we have paused a bustling scene. It feels as if the serenity of the moment might be broken with one false move. And I wonder, are these people on their way to work, energized and invigorated by the rays of a new day's sun? Or are their steps heavy after a long day's work, aching, yet rushing to get home.

Shinjuku

Night_of_Shinjuku, originally uploaded by clarice & ....

Here's a glorious example of cross processed slide film out of a Lomo LC-A. This is a great night time shot filled with plenty of interesting detail. For me, this photograph has become iconic of one of the busiest districts of one of Asia's busiest cities: Shinjuku, Tokyo. Shooting from a pedestrian overpass, Clarice was able to capture the towering neon billboards and store marquees illuminating the busy street below.

The wonderful contrast and saturation really makes this image shine. It's likely due to a combination of the 100iso film and the cross processing. The choice of film, Kodak Ektachrome, along with the color temp of those street lamps probably contributed the green cast. The sharpness through most of the scene and the vignetting at the edges are thanks to the awesome Lomo LC-A.

I'm somehow drawn to the motif of striped crosswalks, featured at the bottom of this frame, and pedestrians at night. I feel that it's a key element in the concept of urbanity. While the night encroaches from all sides, the metropolis holds the stifling darkness at bay. The deep patches of black night all around serve to set the lights in brilliant relief. Looking at this photo from a distance, or as a thumbnail, the jumble of lights seem to explode out of that vanishing point, moving not just out towards the edges of the photo to conquer that night, but up and off the page/screen to enforce its super-reality.