I’ve seen a lot of movies lately, but this one is different. A Single Man is a story about a British college professor who is struggling to find meaning to his life after the death of his long time partner. For me personally, the most significant thing about this movie is the cinematography. Every shot in this movie —and I really mean every shot— is just awesome. I think every still in the movie is a very good picture on itself. The cinematographer (Director of Photography) Eduard Grau did a great job imho… respect!! Here are a few movie stills that prove they are great pictures too (note: no editing done, the movie is like the pictures, even with the grain, the colors, and some scenes in high-contrast black and white).
Not all credit should go to Eduard Grau though, the movie is directed by fashion designer Tom Ford. Tom Ford was creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent before he started his own brand. This is his debut as a movie director and he has done really well. Read this NYT article if you’re interested in more and make sure to go to see the movie, because it’s going to win an Oscar, that’s for sure!
I love photography. And most of all, portraits. If you’d ask 3 photographers to make a portrait of the same person, the result will be totally different. Although the subject is the same, there is so much room for a personal touch. It’s all about the light, the atmosphere, the face, the assets, smoke, background, …
My favourite portrait photographer at the moment is Belgian photographer Stephan Vanfleteren. His portraits are really amazing imo. Good friend of mine, Thomas Vanhaute has great portraits as well, check out this beautiful portraits of Stanny Crets, Yasmine and many, many more. Photos like these inspire me so much to experiment myself with light, settings, etc. I want to officially declare this new year as the “I-want-to-make-portraits” – year :) Here are some of my older portrait experiments.
I’ve had a Lomo LCA camera for about 5 years but sold it about a year ago. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot with it but it’s quite clear for me that I had to “upgrade”. With the LCA you have to anticipate the distance to your object to get a sharp picture, you can’t rely on the viewfinder to be accurate, and the vignetting might be cool but is not always. A lot of these things caused me to get a bit annoyed about it.
I wanted to frame the picture exactly like I wanted it to be, I wanted to control the focus and depth of field exactly as I wanted to be, etc. So I sold my LCA. Yesterday I bumped into a huge stack of pictures, all from within those 5 years of LCA pleasure. I’ve uploaded a couple of them on Flickr. For me it’s pure nostalgia :)
Replacement? Yes! I’ve found this lovely old Minolta on a second handed marked and bought it for 20 euros with three nice lenses (50mm f/1.2, 28mm f/2.8 and a 135mm f/2.8 lens) and a couple of accessories. It’s great! Manual focus, manual setup, manual manual manual :) Last week in Paris, I found this cool little Lomo LCA key chain in the same shop where I bought my first LCA. They make a perfect match!
I’ve been waiting for a good iPhone camera app. Some of the better ones are CameraBag, QuadCamera and Polarize but none of them are as good as “The Best Camera” app. On first sight, you might notice that the name is quite ridiculous, but there’s a perfect explanation for that. The app has been made by professional photographer Chase Jarvis and the iPhone developers at Übermind. The app got it’s name from Chases’ book: “The Best Camera is The One That’s With You“.
In all good iPhone camera apps, you can add an effect to a photo and publish it to some social network sites. The Best Camera is not different, except for it’s features, you can:
- add effects and easily enable/disable them again (some of the effects: light, dark, fade, contrast, desaturate, vignette, …)
- reorganize them (for example: to change it to black/white first and then add contrast instead of the other way around)
- easily share them to facebook, twitter or thebestcamera.com by enabling check boxes
- set the color mood (warm/cool)
- add some premade preset effects (jewel, paris, candy, slate)
- frame the picture with a white border or make it square
This app is going to change the mood of the iPhone photos I’m sharing on twitpic, yfrog, facebook and flickr. (via)
Phillip Toledano tells the story about his father. It’s a story that grabbed me by the throat. The pictures are really nice and the story is beautiful and heart breaking at the same time. Site by fbuddha.
