When I was young, I sometimes walked through the house looking through the viewfinder of my father’s old mirror reflex camera pretending that I was making movies. For some reason I find life much more interesting when it’s “framed” by a viewfinder. I’ve always been intrigued and curious about how my life would be, being a cameraman or a photographer. Sadly enough I never studied photography or video (I don’t regret many things in my life, but this one is definitely in my top 3).
I’ve got a couple of friends that are professional photographers and they inspire me a lot, I really hope to be as good as them one day! :)
Last month I joined Wannabes. It’s an ‘independent collective for rock photography’, call it a group of fun people, with great love for photography and music. It’s great because I can combine two things I love doing: listening to nice music and taking pictures ;) Click here to check out some of my concert pictures. Here’s Leki on Mano Mundo last week:
Without doubt one of the coolest blogs around.
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” —Gore Vidal
Nicholson & Penn.
Cash.
Avedon.
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!
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.
