Nikio

Some say that this global warming thing might end up the life on Earth. It is far too pessimistic to assume that our contribution can sterilize the planet. We can easily erase our kind, but life will eventually win. It is enough for a few rats, some lizards and a couple of bacteria to survive and we'll have the same richness of life within 20 million years (that happened when dinosaurs were gone).

But one thing is striking. It took about 530 million years since The Cambrian explosion to make practically all evolution of complex life which ends up with an intelligent one. Since the Sun still has about 2 billion healthy years of shining, that could easily result into 3 or even 4 more such evolutions. Each of them can end up with intelligent life even sooner (given the ever lower possibility for meteor collision). It's a pity we won't be there to see it.

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?

Kornati Trekking from Nikio on Vimeo.

You can enjoy it in 720p HDTV!

I promissed myself many times that my blog will not be political under any circumstances. Being political means you have to take a side and some very good people will be left on the other with a new gap inbetween. Not many can overlook that gap and remain friends. So please, don't take this post as a political statement for IT IS NOT! It is merely an observation. I pledge to remain politicaly neutral.

I believe that success of a nation or even human kind is a collective effort. Of course there are ones among us that push the carriage a bit harder and make significant contributions, but nevertheless we are all on the same boat and we all have to put somethin in. In a society that we have today, we can't (yet?) function as a self-organising crowd - we need somekind of leadership. But what does define a good leader? Is it his ability to know everything? Hardly! It is impossible to be skilled in every skill of the people you guide. A conductor does not play all the istruments he conducts. The real mastery of leadership is in ability to bring the best out of people. It is the ability to inspire and bring people beyond their natural limits. I remember that with good conductors I played my sax better than I would normally play solo. It was an incredible feeling when I felt like the hand of God* is guiding my fingers.

I can not tell what kind of a president Barack Obama will be. I shall be careful and not predict a thing. But I know this; from what we had seen so far, he has an incredible ability to inspire people to work and push beyond what they would normaly do. It is not about what he can do, it is about what we** can do under his lead. And this is why I am extremely happy that he is ellected president and I am optimistic for the next 8 years and hopefully more.



Notes:
* - God is meant metaphorically
** - when I say we, I mean people of the western world. It is clear now that USA has such strong and influental economy that it's president is actually the leader of the whole western civilisation. In good and in bad.

"Maturantska parada" is a big event in Central Europe that started 7 years ago in Ljubljana (Slovenia) with an annual goal to break the world record in synchronised Quadrille dance that is traditionally danced by senior high-school students as a part of their official prom program (in Slovenia). And since there is exactly 4 years of our local high-school here in Ilirska Bistrica, it means that we have a first generation of our own senior students to dance. Our school joined this international event and contributed 42 dancers. They danced on the main city square where by pure chance was also a weekly fair going on, so there was a lot of people who watched it. The whole thing reminds me on how much fun it is to be 18 - just old enough to have everything legally and young enough to neglect all of the responsibility that goes with it. Being in senior high rocks!



Here are some more pics of my own, or you can hit a much larger selection here.


See photos and video from other cities...

It is amazing what goes trough one's mind when one finds it difficult to sleep. One thing that buggs me lately is teleportation. Of course this is more or less a fictional thing (in my opinion because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, by which it becomes impossible to locate particles).
But let's just say it is possible. In most of the sci-fi cases, the person being teleported is usually disintegrated in the process. Perhaps that is not necessary. Imagine a 30 years old scientist beging sent to a planet that is 15 light years away. His body is being scaned here on Earth and the information then travels 15 years to that planet, presumably that there alredy is a technology in place to reproduce his body based on the information that is sent. As he is being "printed" there, his original is already 45. For the copy it was only a split of a second.
The copy then conducts some research and starts sending the data back to Earth. When the first data arrives, the original is already 60! Let's say that after 5 years of research, the copy wants to "go back" and train some future copys for this planet. He is being scaned again and the signal is sent back to Earth. Now while the original copy stays and lives there, the signal carying information about his body travels 15 years back to Earth. When the copy of the copy is printed on Earth, the original is already 65 (30+15+5+15) and the first copy is 50 (30+5+15), while for the copy of the copy it was again only 5 years since departure from Earth and therefore he feels 35. Imagine the conversation between those two who are then on Earth (65 & 35 version).

Now; there is a hard question of whether or not the copy is the same person. The atoms used to make the copy are "not the same" as the atoms creating the original. Well; it turns out, that our body completly changes ALL of it's atoms every 7 years as we eat food, go to toilet and also reproduce our cells. You can think about an event that happened 7 or more years ago and try to picture yourself there... Well, none of the atoms in your current body were acutally there, but your identity and it's continuity remains valid. We are more or less like waves on the sea surface that travel trough space and time, but the watter of which they consist always changes (from the wave's perspective). From the perspective of the watter, each wave is just a temporary state... The same might be said for our body which is just a temporary state of the matter, while from our perspective we carry an individual identity, whatever the matter is building us. So yes; the reproduced copy is exactly the same person and if you were sent there (and perhaps even disintegrated here on Earth), you wouldn't suffer. You are doing it all the time. But after that, a copy finds him self in the new environment with new experiences which define him in a completly new way. So at the end we have 3 scientists with the same memory utill their 30's but different future.

Image source

Yesterday I was photographing the concert of our local brass band. Unfortunatelly I couldn't play, because I was missing the practice in autumn, but listening to my band for the first time in many years simply as a visitor was a delightful experience anyway.

The light for photographing was not exactly dim, but chaotic, so I decided it is time to experiment. I took a BW film (Ilford PAN 400) to avoid any shifts in color temperature and pushed it to 3200 ISO!!! It is was the first time I did a push of such magnitude and I didn't know what kind of results to expect.

Well - It is better than I expected!!! A lot better! The pictures are not as grainy as one could predict and they gained a lot of contrast. A lot of whites and a lot of blacks, but not many greys inbetween. The images have some sort of mystic atmosphere, they look very similar to the image of the Sin City movie, which is soooo stylish! Here is an example (It is made by hands in the darkroom, no photoshop whatsoever - just raw scan of a physical image).



Spending the night in the darkroom (developing photos) is usually an experience of solitude and contemplation. Time passes very quickly and while you wait for the image to appear, there is a lot of time to think. It is funny, how analogue photography seems more real to me than the digital. I believe it is because more senses are involved in the process of it. With BW films, you literally do the photos with your own hands, and you can touch it, smell it, see it... In the digital world, everything is so abstract and distant. I am not trying to romanticize it too much, but there is something too it. It is like playing an electirc piano; it sounds and feels like the real thing, untill you try the real thing! When you can actually feel, see, touch and smell the strings or mechanisms that produce the sound the whole experience gets far more overwhelming.

It is the physical world we have been living in for the last 99.9999...% of the evolution and all our mental devices are more or less developed to serve the function of the physical perception. Abstract thinking is really cool because it helps you to think about the future and things beyond, but the power of the experience is still based upon sensorial perception.

There are some more pics below... Enjoy!

PS: And merry Christmas all!

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Yesterday I went to hear the lecture and see the photos from world class photographer, explorer, diver, sailor (and so on...) Arne Hodalič. He is the only Slovenian photographer to be published in the international issue of the National Geographic magazine and now holds the chair of photo-editor of the Slovenian franchise.

His story was about an adventure that he had taken with an old sailing boat for little less than a year (as I can remember his words) and went all around the Southeast Asia, exploring the sea, vulcanos, caves, old tribes, fighting the pirates and doing things, most of us don't have the guts to.

I spiced up the evening by buying his book, reciving an autograph and meeting an other fellow photographer, Peter Bernik.

I've came to the conclusion that small details of everyday's life situations take a key role in the quality of our lives and success we achive. How is this possible?
For example; we all know how important is the first impression a new guy makes on us when we first meet. Imagine two different situations; in first he's a smiling and open charachter and in second he is a timid and closed person. Maybe the real person behind is the same and he just had an extremly good or a bad day. In first case you might decide to continue a relationship with that person and you shall gain a fantastic new friendship, but in second, you missed that chance. And it is all because that bustard didn't have the guts to gather some strength and simply be nice for a minute.

So I think it is extremely important that we take a conscious part in order to control such details. Smile, when you meet new pepople, think carefuly what to wear not just on important occasions, but all the time, write adress on envelope with special care (you will impress the reciver), look confident when you enter the room... Of course this takes effort (a lot of it, sometimes), but which good thing doesn't!?

I believe your everyday life experience will then be a lot more powerful. You will have more of life and I think this kind of thinking leads to better business as well.