Arts

Highly Creative Self-Portraits

Photography

My Modern Metropolis features some interesting self-portraits from a guy called Pierre Beteille. It certainly gives some inspiration of what can be done with this format.

I conceive photography like painting. The camera is just one of the tools. Photoshop allows me to create my images. So the first and main part of the process is not taking a picture but finding an idea… the idea always comes first and then I seek the best way to achieve it, and I know exactly what I want to get before shooting. My inspiration is the human being. Its absurdity, its irrationality, its pettiness in everyday life. Inspiration can come therefore from politics or religion, life and death, as well as food, television and all our daily behaviors.

I generally try to make images that offer several levels of reading. We first see something and a detail gives another interpretation …and multiple interpretations are possible according to the beholder… And I also try to make people smile!

Check out the site for more interesting photographs and the rest of the interview.

Asus Tablet

Books, Tech, Thought Provoking

Now this is an interesting device which was reported by laptop mag has reported. The article also mentions a device where a 12 inch table can attach itself to a keyboard to transform itself into a notebook. However, I’m a fan of devices becoming as small as possible but also to be usuable. The iPad (which I saw for the first time yesterday) is too heavy and too big for my liking. That’s what makes the third device to interesting.

As a note-taker, the Eee Tablet could hardly offer more functionality. Its stylus uses Wacom technology to give it an incredibly smooth drawing / hand writing experience. But if writing down notes or drawing diagrams when you’re in a meeting or class is not enough, why not take a picture of the whiteboard? The Eee Tablet has a back facing camera that will take photos of anything and let you annotate it. You can also record sound while you take notes. So just imagine recording a college lecture and then playing it back while you read the notes and look at photos of the whiteboard.

It seems to me to be something business people would take to in droves. The iPad is notoriously unhelpful for productive tasks like writing, there is no camera and as far as I’m aware, there is no microphone. The ASUS tablet has all three. It seems that ASUS has stolen a march on their competitors yet again. Watch them try and catch up.

Coincidence

Cinema, Thought Provoking, Travel

I just rewatched “Before Sunset”, the sequel to one of my favourite films “Before Sunrise”. I was struck during the dialogue that Ethan Hawke’s character notes that 6 months after a life-changing event whether it was winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic, a person reverts to the psychological state that they inhabited before the event. Then I read the latest post by Tim Harford this evening.

It’s quite possible that our image of these possible futures is not very good. As the psychologist Dan Gilbert points out, you might think that winning the Lottery would make you happier than being permanently paralysed from the waist down, but the empirical evidence suggests that this is just a failure of imagination: paraplegics are not, in fact, less happy than people who have won the Lottery.

By the way, the film is definitely better the second time around. I wish that I could see Before Sunrise again right now. My favourite part is at the end of the film where they show all of the places in Vienna where the story unfolded the next morning, deserted. I felt that way about Prague for a long time.

LX5

Photography

I see the successor to the Panasonic LX3 has been announced, the LX5. More details of which can be found on the main photo review sites (dpreview.com for example). The new features don’t seem to justify an upgrade for someone who already owns an LX3. What was particularly disappointing was the fact that the lens cap is still detached from the camera. I will be very interested in the successor to the Canon S90 if it arrives in the near future.

Project 2: focus with a set aperture

Photography

The second project in my photography course was shot way back in September in Munich. The purporse of this project was to shoot the same scene but focusing on different dimensions. This would concentrate attention on different parts of the photograph.


This first image focuses on the closest feature of the scene which was the back of a woman’s head as she watched a street band on Kaufingerstrasse. This photo is not that interesting as the background is too blurry and out of focus while the head is not so interesting from the back.


This is the medium view where the focus is directed at the accordian players in the band. They back of the woman’s head is still visible but out of focus. It is still interesting that it is contained in the image as it gives the impression of a crowd watching the band.


The furthest focus was taken after many attempts to find something interesting to focus on in the passing crowd behind the band. Here, a man comes out of the Kaufhof shop and seems to focus his attention past the band to the camera. This is probably unintentional and was a result of the luck of the shot. Here the accordian player is slightly out of focus but in a much more clear way that in the first photo. In my opinion, this is my preferred photo of the three.