Spotlight #8 (with my third guest)

This week's spotlight (I know I'm a week late), features a photo from Stapho Thienpont. 

Stapho and I connected via Instagram over our mutual love of photography, and after a little chat, he agreed to send me one of his pictures to help the series. 

You can find his stuff here - https://www.instagram.com/staphosadventure/

His pictures have a really clean feel to them, which is what made me curious as to whether I could get him on the series. 

Check out the photo and what he has to say below - 

"It's my girlfriends mother visiting my girlfriends Apartment. What I like about it is that you can see that it's not her own room but a students and you can see on her face that she's reminiscing her own student time.

it's a quick snapshot without much planning but it gives a glimpse of a real moment, anyone can relate to their mom or similar visiting them and reminiscing about a time when they were in a similar situation in time

it's not about showing this moment, it's about reminding you about a similar moment you had in your life

it's taken on a 38 mm full frame equivalent lens, so it's a mild wide angle lens, that way it feels pretty similar to what your eyes would see, it also means I had to be pretty close to take it"

Again cheers to Stapho for agreeing to be come on here. Check out his other stuff here - https://www.instagram.com/staphosadventure/

Spotlight #7 - Focus

Today's spotlight is on one of my own. 

This picture means a lot to me for many different reasons. I'll keep it short and talk about the main ones. 

So this was taken during my first official gig. There were a whirlwind of emotions going through my body as I left for the venue. 

Funnily enough though, they all disappeared as soon as I started working. 

For a large part of the evening, I was experimenting and just sort of going with the flow. I knew the outline of what I was supposed to be doing, and I knew what I wanted to do. 

As the night progressed, I felt my adrenaline get jacked, which led to me going crazy with the pictures. 

In the middle of all of them was this one. The lights and shadows really stood out to me, but more than that was Philip himself. The man is a behemoth from the Czech Republic, and really takes up the frame. 

His face alone fills this picture up completely. The emotionless expression on his face show how focused he was. He was there to do a job, and boy did he do it well. 

Every time I look at this picture, I see that. It speaks to me. 

I want to know your thoughts, too. Do you have a picture like that? What do you think of this one.

Let me know in the comments below!

My work with Boxout FM

This Wednesday will mark one month since I started collaborating with Boxout.fm.

(Note: it's been over a year now since I started working with Boxout Fm).

Think of them as India's equivalent to Boiler Room. 

For a dude like me, who's forever been on the fringe of electronic music, Boxout served as a perfect way for me to get more into that subculture. I was always interested in learning more about the culture, but i never knew where to start. Boxout threw me into the deep end.

Coincidentally, I had something to offer to them, and a beautiful symbiotic relationship has since developed. 

Find out more about them here. 

So far I've had a blast shooting with them even thought it has been slightly challenging shooting in such low light. 

The day of my first gig, I debated about shooting with a mounted flash, and after mucking around a few times with it, I decided I'd go au natural. 

The flash does work, mind you, and I've got nothing against using it in other situations. But, I felt it was right to capture the gigs in the natural light beaming out of the projector, because it captures the vibe of the place so so well.

(Note: I have since been shooting with a mounted flash, and the results have been astounding). 

Also, it forces me to be on my toes because I never know how the light is going to shine on the performer's face. 

Creatively, it's been an awesome experience because I've had a lot of room for experimentation, and I'm enjoying the process of establishing a certain niche within that field of photography. 

Check out a few pictures from the last few weeks below, and find some of my favourite shots here. 

Spotlight #6 (with second special guest)

Continuing on with the trend from last week, I've got on another friend who's venturing into the rabbit hole of photography. 

Funnily enough, Doug was my roommate for an entire year, and I had no idea that he was such a visual person, and yet now almost a year after moving out, we've reconnected over this simple common interest. 

One look at the picture, and you can see why I as interested in finding the story behind it. Here's what Doug has to say:

"So this is a photo I took while my family was traveling around Cinque Terre, back in September. There is a hike between the five cities that make up the Cinque Terre coast, we had been hiking most of the day, and we approached Manarola right around sunset. 

I shot the photo on my iPhone 6s, using the panorama function, and only lowered the brightness before taking the photo. I take a lot of sunset pictures, like too many, but there is something incredibly beautiful about this photo, it captures something beautiful, but it also captures a memory, which is how I feel every photo should be taken."

-Doug Lappe

Listening to what he had to say about it was awesome, because it's exactly how I feel about the pictures I take. It's the memory that makes up most of it, and invoking an emotion in the viewer is the best part about photography. 

Follow Doug here.

What are your thoughts on the picture? Do you have another view on photography overall? 

I would love to hear it. Leave a comment or two below. 

Cheers

Aman

How "noise" is often misunderstood

Noise is one part of photography that I've been exploring a lot lately. 

It's the effect that you get when you increase the exposure on your picture so much that it starts to look grainy. 

Aesthetically speaking, pictures with a lot of noise can start to look quite amateurish - as though you didn't know what you were doing, and are thus overcompensating in your post processing to balance out the lack of light. 

They can also be easily perceived as out of focus, and quite bland and grey.

I, however, think that there's quite a bit of artistic quality to a 'noisy' picture. 

Here's why: 

Photography back in the day used to be with film. And with film, it's quite rare that you get the crispest and sharpest picture. 

The film effect gave it a quality that is somewhat lost today. 

The grainy, dull like look that you can get from a film or noisy picture does take skill to capture. It requires a lot of subtlety in the way you express yourself, and requires you to go for a minimalist approach, which in itself is quite a hard skill to master. 

I find the grain very appealing, and in fact have been focusing more on getting this quality to my pictures. 

Obviously, it depends on who I'm working with and whether or not my vision matches up with theirs. 

But the grainy feature, while it can be a romantic notion, doesn't necessarily mean that the picture is actually 'bad.'

I find photography a very, very subjective art, and I'm going to strive towards bringing noise back into focus. (No pun intended).

Follow Oliver Mumm to get a better idea of what I mean. 

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Cheers