Nikio

Finally the book on Virtual space is out. Yesterday we had quite a party and hopefully this book will be as successful as it deserves.You can order it from the official site (link above).


The book


And its author, dr. Or Ettlinger

Recently I had to defend my portfolio (most of it can be seen here) and a member of the jury asked me to separate digital photos from those taken on film. I did so, and then I explained the difference in paradigms of shooting on each medium. Not that film was expensive, the mistakes were! I would gladly spend three rolls of Velvia or Portra VC if I knew I had The Photo, but the price of failing was a bit to high to act this way. I had to think a lot more so I killed many ideas in the start. As a result certain subjects or approaches were considered unworthy of photographing. Not anymore on digital and that explains the explosion of diversity seen on Flickr and elswhere.

"But don't you think that rapid and thought-less shooting [common on digital] leaves you with photographs of lesser quality?" the jury asked.

"Perhaps," I answered. "Perhaps that is what happened to me in the first weeks after I made the switch from analogue to digital. But then one has to find a balance between the paradigms of film-like planing or contemplation and high-speed-intuitive action (believed to be common on digital)."

That is not a bad answer, however, it is not an accurate one. What I should answer is the following:
Rapid shooting is just a technique. It has been popular in sports photography for decades (even on film) because it is the only way to ensure a good photograph. It doesn't mean sports photographers are careless, they need this technique. Often they do a lot of thinking and planing in advance (before the competition). They examine the light, camera angles, athletes' motion (etc) and set up their work flow hours before the actual exposure. Then they shoot their thing. This video might be a good example.

Rapid shooting is essential to get a good photograph.

In landscape or fine art photography rapid shooting is often no advantage. No matter what medium (digital or film), photos have to be well composed and properly lit. And there the "film paradigm" is still well practiced on digital.

A technique/medium should not be confused with the attitude! If one has a careless attitude towards the art and photography, one remains ignorant on film as well as on digital. But if one seeks for perfection, the medium doesn't matter.

On top on what I wrote here, lets see is what it is already happening now. Press agencies are often taking local photographers instead of sending their top guys on an assignment. Equipment and knowledge got a lot more accessible, so you can have a photographer on the place who is good enough and you don't need to send an American or German photographer there (to Africa, for example). This is of course a lot cheaper.

I think this will go one step further. Not only that the local photographers will contribute more, amateurs will too. I don't mean just amateur photographers who buy fancy cameras and make their own little exhibitions, I mean people who don't have a clue about photography. People like my dad who has a camera in his cell phone. These people are all around and they carry cameras along with them. They can record material that was never recorded before, simply because they are there when it happens and some PRO photographer wasn't. So why not submit that to the press? Just for the fun of it.

And just to be clear; every broken window in a local shop doesn't have to be photographed by a professional. Most of trivial news can be easily visualized by random folks who just happened to be there. But when something big happens, well, then you need the top guys. You can't send an amateur to cover the Olympics, can you? Or Obama's inauguration. Perhaps if press saves some money on trivial events with the amateur contributions, PRO's can be payed better on big stuff. That would probably call for less photo journalists.

Some other photographers took a different path. They make really good stories on their own (as freelancers) and then they try to sell it or get a grant. In Perpignan there were quite many who work this way. Ed Ou, for example, made a story about victims of radiation in Kazahstan. But I think that this model doesn't really create incentives for people to join this profession unless the rewards are great (which they aren't).

Every crysis ends up with something new invented. The old model not being fit for the circumstances anymore is the reason we got into trouble in the first place. Sometimes it takes a generation to change, but often we don't have that much time. We'll see how this turns out.

Last week I was in Perpignan (France) for the world's largest festival of photojournalism, Visa pour l'image 09. Many world class photographers came (Steve McCurry, Eugene Richards or Stanley Greene to name just a few). And the whole time there was a perpetuating theme; photojournalism is dead.

I can tell you from my experience, that most news papers in Slovenia have ever-smaller budget for photography. Especially for the high-end journalistic photos (which are not to be mistaken for snapshots). They just don't pay! I for one covered Elton John in Croatia entirely pro bono and perhaps for my own amusement and prestige. This happens all the time.

There are many reasons why. I am not experienced enough for a deep analysis, but I can give you a few.

Of course there is financial crisis, but that might just as well be an excuse.

Then there is the availability of the tools; photo cameras. Anyone can buy a decent SLR and that creates an illusion that anyone can make photos... Well, we can all buy a basketball, but can we play like Jordan???
This fact has two major consequences; I greet the first and despise the second.

Firstly we have an abundant creativity of the amateurs. You can see that on Flickr. Millions of photos are uploaded every day. With such a low cost of failure, people experiment more and we found ways of expression that were unimaginable just a decade ago. I watch Flickr and Vimeo very closely, and I continue to be amazed every day. This is great, but it creates a pressure for the professionals not only to become even better and better, but also to grasp the new digital paradigm of creativity. It is difficult for an 50 year old pro (who shot prohibitively expensive Fuji Velvia for most of his life) to start thinking like a 15 year old kid who has nothing to loose. Especially the older generation has many problems now and most of them are paradigmatic. Their skill is not in question, but they have to change the way they think if they want to survive. I believe that is good in the long term. Every revolution has its sacrifices.

But secondly, every journalist (writing journalist) can now have a small camera and press the shutter while not taking notes. And that is profoundly WRONG! These people have NO TRAINING and in general even no talent for visual communication. They are great with words, but they don't know a diddly-squat about visual narrative. As a consequence, newspapers are full of snapshots in the worst possible meaning of that word. In the best case, photos published by some more local daily papers are average, but more often they are terrible.

I get it. Papers have to make cuts. But papers must also realize, that VISUALS SELL (not only photography, but also design)! Editors (again, most of them trained with words) have very high standards and respect for verbal part of the media. They consider it underestimating to publish a crapy text with grammar errors. And that is right, we must have high standards for the written word, but we also must have high standards for the imagery. Pictures can be compelling beyond explanation and together with words they can create a story that is a lot more powerful than words or pictures alone. What bothers me is not just the low quality of visuals, it is the imbalance of those two.

So for now we are in a state of crisis. The old model is still around, the new one is not quite invented yet. How to make it in the future? Will photographers all have to go freelance? I have no idea.

My clients often ask me how much do I charge for a picture. Sometimes they even ask me how much I charge for an hour of work. I can hardly give them an answer to that. Pictures are worthless in physical terms. Once you buy a camera and disk storage it costs exactly nothing to produce a picture. My hour of work might be difficult to calculate because there is a difference if I work in studio or outside in rain where bullets fly around.
But I do know what my quality is. I know how much I invested in my knowledge, AND THAT IS WHAT I CHARGE. "But how many photos will you take at our wedding," they ask. "As much as I have to," i reply. How many hours will I spend in post-production? As many as I have to in order to guarantee a good result!

So the paradigm has to change, some will die, some will rise, but that's life, isn't it?

I have always had some love for the sounds. Perhaps it is driven by the same momentum that keeps me in photography; to document stuff before it dissolves in time, and perhaps even to build upon it. In the past years I have spent quite some money on an audio recording hardware. I recorded several concerts, even an orchestral one and learned a lot about how the sound works. Even my thesis at the university was acoustical, not visual. So it was kind of late for me to buy this gadget (Olympus LS-10). I mean; I should have had it for years. It would save me a lot of frustration. I could have recorded a lot more than I had.

But anyways, here it is. Yesterday we had a stormy night, so I put it out on a dry window and recorded an hour or so. Then I selected the best parts, recorded some dull guitar chords over it and viola! I put it in a form of a video, because it is easier to upload, consume and credit it that way. I hope you like it




PS: I strongly suggest you use headphones...

So it has been a while... again.

When I photograph people, many of them find me annoying. Really. And I can't really blame them; I am not happy with just one or two photos. I must take them at least 50. But there are profound reasons why.

First of all; I wanna make sure that the person looks good on my photograph. In order to achieve that two things must happen; the person must be adopted on my shooting (for that I must be there a while) so that he or more often she is relaxed enough to look natural. And a larger amount of photos must be taken in order to statistically ensure a technically good photograph (in terms of eye blinking, expression, and also focus, sharpness, composition, etc).

But there is a deeper reason and it lies in the way I think about photography. Usually, when I'm in the zone, I'm not even thinking about the object of my shooting. I am literally making the photograph, not taking it. I am thinking in 2D. I am producing a 2-dimensional pattern of our visual communication. At least I try to. The people or objects are just grand means to achieve that. So even if I did 20 photos with you, I might have a new message to deliver or a new emotion to visualize. And that has nothing (or little at best) to do with documenting your physical appearance. For that, one or two photos would surely be enough. But for producing items of visual communication, I could work with a singe model for years... I try to find the next level of portraiture where models are actually actors (very much like in movies) who co-author my story. That story can be also be documentary, but not necessarily. And this is also why I started to systematically study other fields of art like painting, movie-making, sculpting... I am especially interested in works of Asian artists who are supposed to have a bit different way of thinking than us, Europeans. I read and heard a lot about that from many neurological sources, it is a bit too complex to go into it rihgt now, but there are great things there to discover!

Hello again! I try to be as bussy as possible (living is expensive these days). Last week I was on a workshop in Dragonja with my multimedia class from Koper primary school (the team that produced this). We spent 3 days in forest near the Dragonja river and tried to make something out of it.



The idea was to use disposable film cameras. I figured that with complicated cameras a lot of time is lost to actually manage the camera and not much is left for creativity and content issues. With disposable cameras you don't have to worry about the settings, you just take pictures! They are amazing tools!

So this is what we made. The story is told trough the eyes of a frog which for once in its life wishes to see the home pond not from the "frogs perspective", but from the "birds eye view". The frog swims trough the pond, escapes the hands of a hunter, climbs on a rock, takes the view and jumps back down. But the jump was miscalculated.

Read more...

People tend to assert certain names to certain things and find relations among them. Usually we call those names categories. For example; you may have heard of classical music, rap, pop, rock... or landscape photography, portraiture, fashion, sports... or parts of the brain like cortex, cerebellum, thalamus...

This is all OK, but the problem is, that most of the people take those categories too seriously or too literally. There is no distinct border between classical or rock music because those two categories of the same category of art (again, category) share many similarities and even common grounds. Of course, they have some differences, but where would you draw the line??? These labels are here not because they would represent some real categories, they are here just to help us communicate and they serve well as long as we keep in mind that things are a lot more organic and complex in reality.

The same goes for every other kind of category; categories in art, categories in tools even categories in different types of personalities, modes of thinking, creativity processes and so on!

Even experts (especially psychologists have this tendency) like to have things sorted out in drawers; keep a name for every thing that occurs. But the life is complex and organic; people can't just fit in a drawer because much like rock and classical music, there is no distinct line between musical or graphical kind of creativity. Again; these words are here just to help us understand each other and do not represent real (=physical) differences in direct and literal terms as many would have liked. This would have given a lot of consolation for many who would like to think that they have figured the world out. But they haven't. In fact they are often using fancy words to cover up their infantile understanding.



Perhaps it has to do with survival; people who have their experiences sorted out are in better position to survive (tigers are dangerous, olives are good, apples are healthy...), but in modern society we should know better than that. We should understand that the underlying nature of the world is a lot more astonishing than we could even begin to understand and that the words we come up with to describe it may represent only a selected few of its surface properties.

So yes; use "categories" but only to the extent where you are still aware of the fact that this are just words, made up by humans and do not necessarily reflect the actual nature of things.


Image by striatic

Some time ago I wrote about what resolution in media might be. Only later I remembered a xkcd comic in which the charachter contemplates how wide our options are and how we yet choose to live only a few of "day-types" over and over again. Imagine how it would be like if you could live every day anew, with different tasks and different people.

Something like that is happening to me last 10-14 days and it will go on for an other 5. I have no steady routine, each day is really something special. That is not to say it is spontaneous and improvised, on contrary, my activities are well planed, but still days are very different in comparison to eachother. And they are packed with work work work... From 7AM to 10PM. I could say that right this moment I live a very high-resolution life A lot of data in short amount of time.

One might think this is cool, and it is. But it is also very fatiguing. I learned that repetition is what keeps us fresh for the new stuff (to some extent). It quite hard to live like this for a longer period of time. I can't wait to slip back into a warm old daily routine. At least for a while, to get some mental rest.

So, what was I up to? I can give you a few things, there is lot's more, but I don't want to bore you

One of the things was a new creativity conference, organized by UMMI. It was really really cool. I opened the conference with a Keynote lecture of my own (video will follow), and then I was blown away by lectures of dr. Zadel, dr. Juriševič, Korado Korlevič and many others. This is me during the lecture (photo by Mojca Kukanja Gabrijelčič):


G33Ks might notice a familiar face on my t-shirt Moar photos.

This year I also went on Kras marathon for which I designed the main poster and some postcards. The postcards were designed with photos from Flickr via Creative Commons licence. It is soo cool to have that kind of colaboration across the world. This is a postcart for 4 events that will happen this year. Photos are contributed by Cobalt_sun, ((brian)), Randy Son Of Robert and Samo Onič, who is not on Flickr.

The poster:



That is me with my design. Again - sharp geeky eyes might recognize bent corners on my number tag. This weekend Battlestar Galactica hit its final run and such an important event must be celebrated with every possible detail. I dedicated my 8.4 km run to this series finale.
Moar photos!

So, as mentioned - Battlestar Galactica Series Finale happens only once in a lifetime, therefore it deserves a special party, full of geeks, pizzas (we even ordered one with BSG caption on it), computers and elaborated debates about things that exist only in our imagination(s). But it was great. I'm not giving you any spoilers though...

I don't sleep much these days so I'm dedicating this photo to anyone who can relate.

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