Everybody say Cheese :-)

Working title: I am a tourist, therefore I photograph

2009-08-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

These days I am working on a series of images that I took while on vacation in Krakow, Poland.In time, this will turn into a book

Krakow is indeed a beautiful city, filled to the brim with tourists and their cameras (me included). Since it is almost a law of nature that one should take lots of pictures while on vacation, I decided to explore this phenomenon a little further

Like most vernacular photography,vacation pictures is about creating memories to be stored in an archive (used to be a photo album). What I am interested in is the fact that most tourists don't care about things like composition or other photographic do's and dont's when taking a picture. Therefore, I tried to do my best and adhere to the "snapshot aesthetic" for this project

Anyway, my interest in this type of photography can be narrowed down to two things:

What tourists photograph and how

For this project I am working with a point and shoot camera that went out of style 10-years ago and that whole "film-thing". I don't anticipate being done until next summer. I have a trip to a very touristy place in the Caribbean this coming April. Needless to say, the photographic possibilities are just too tempting to pass up.

More later

Embracing low resolution

2009-08-11T12:58:00.000-07:00

For the past year or so I have played around with a digital camera made for kids.(see picture above) It was actually a gift for my daughter, but she lost interest in it
Anyway, this camera is by photography standards incredibly "shitty" in that it is only capable of producing very small picture files (60 kb or so) Nevertheless, there is something about these pictures that I find appealing. The colors are muted, and the pictures are out of focus. I am curious what happens when you enlarge them to say 11x16- a definitive no-no in the digital world. It might look awful or it might reveal another physical dimension unknown to humankind, who knows. Regardless, we'll see how this one goes

The Joy of amateur photography

2009-07-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

Family pictures or snapshots is a subject that I find strangely intriguing.One of the reasons being its predictability. Pick up any photo album and you pretty much know what to find; a lot of birthday parties,weddings, vacations,kids, dogs and cats. Posed pictures and red eyes is usually the norm.
What is interesting is of course what we choose to photograph and what we leave out which leads me to the British Photographer Martin Parr's claim that family pictures is a form of propaganda. People take pictures in weddings, never in funerals, kids are always supposed to be cute and not cry.
Unless you happen to know the person(s) in a given picture, most family pictures are fairly boring to watch. Nevertheless, there is something about the "snapshot estetique", that is very intriguing. Whereas most serious photographers will strive for pictures that have "good composition", snapshooters couldn't care less about composition and this will occasionally result in an unintentionally interesting picture.
This being the case, I am currently playing around with a "vacation picture theme" for the pctures that I took in Krakow, Poland.I am excited too see how it turns out. More later

Changing a few things here & there...still working on it

2009-07-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

Decided to be more active in the blogosphere since I have not done any serious attempts to write for quite some time. I have no idea whether someone is actually visiting this blog, but that's another topic.
This Spring/Summer has been great with trips to Krakow, Poland and my beloved and much missed homeland Norway. Got quite a bit of material to work with (images that is)so I will use this arena to lay out ideas as I go along

That's it for today