Canon 5D MII EF24-105 f4L @24 | 1/3200s | f/4.0| ISO4000 | Handheld

Canon 5D MII EF24-105 f4L @105 | 1/160s | f/10| ISO200 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/1000s | f/5.6 | ISO100 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@9.3 | 1/25s | f/2.5 | ISO200 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/50s | f/4.0 | ISO100 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/80s | f/2.0 | ISO100 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/2000s | f/8.0 | ISO100 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@12.8 | 0.4s | f/2.0 | ISO200 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/80s | f/4.0 | ISO200 | Handheld

Canon 5D MII EF24-105 f4L @45 | 1/5000s | f/10| ISO1250 | Handheld

Canon 5D MII EF24-70 f4L @45 | 1/10s | f/4.0| ISO6400 | Handheld

Canon 5D MII EF24-70 f4L @24 | 1/125s | f/5.0| ISO500 | Handheld

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L @200 | 1/500s | f/5.6| ISO400 | Handheld

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L @160 | 1/200s | f/6.3| ISO250 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/500s | f/2.2 | ISO100 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/200s | f/2.0 | ISO100 | Handheld

The colors are here…

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@5.1 | 1/200s | f/5.6 | ISO100 | Handheld

This is me, standing on the edge…

Canon 5D MII EF24-105 f4L @67 | 1/50s | f/4 | ISO1600 | Handheld

Well, I guess if I told you what this colorful scene actually is it would ruin all the fun. Anyhow in case you are interested: I took it during site visiting a waste water treatment plant (WWTP). These beautiful colors are indeed  “waste”!

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L @111 | 1/250s | f/9 | ISO400 | Handheld

How do you visualize a sad memory? Try this one.

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L @70 | 1/320s | f/6.3 | ISO200 | Handheld (both photos)

Photos are exactly identical. The only post-process action is the rotation. Which one do you prefer?

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L @127 | 1/640s | f/18 | ISO100 | Handheld (both photos)

I was out of town for few days. Wonderful place with lots of lakes, rains and rainbows. Moments after a quick shower I noticed this “rainy window”. I did several shots of it which I may post later. Starting with this one, I decided to publish two versions of it. The second photo is inverted (+color adjustments) version of the first one. Look how the normal window-frames have converted into an exotic cross-road in a timeless frozen space.

Which one of these two version do you prefer?

Canon 5D MII EF100mm f2.8 macro@100 | 1/10s | f/20 | ISO100 | Handheld (with deliberate hand shake)

I took these photos by deliberately shaking camera during exposure. Later I did some color tone change during post-processing.

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@7.9 | 1/40s | f/2.4 | ISO200 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@7.9 | 1/50s | f/2.4 | ISO100 | Handheld

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@6.3 | 1/80s | f/2.1 | ISO100 | Handheld

no comments.

Canon 5D MII Sigma 12-24mm@12 | 1/20s | f/4.5 | ISO1600 | Handheld

Everything passes… time as well as trains, people as well as their memories … they all pass by, while you are stuck within yourself, frozen on the same standing point.

Accept it, this is your life!

2

Canon 5D MII Sigma 12-24mm@12 | 1/800s | f/4.5 | ISO400 | Handheld (both photos)

What are these seemingly chaotic, random patterns? blood vessels? satellite images of rivers? branches of trees? mathematically generated fractal images?

Probably all… extremely chaotic, yet extremely ordered.

Canon 5D MII Sigma 12-24mm@12 | 1/2500s | f/4.5 | ISO400 | Handheld

This “tree” has almost everything that I like a tree to have.

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L@100 | 1/80s | f/16 | ISO200 | Handheld

This photo is one of my favorites. I like its mood, elements and vision.

I like the dualities embedded in this photo: “bird-man” and “tree-sea” … or “man-tree” and “sea-bird”. And I like all those subtle things that catch the eyes after a while:

The bird is standing on one leg, probably relaxing, while the man is standing on both legs, probably wondering. The sea is calm and protective, the tree is also calm and protective. The water and the bird are bright, the man and the tree are dark; and it’s a real contrast: land vs. sea. There is a coach, but the man stands still (why?). Both the man and the bird are lonely. They are near each other, but as if they are from different species (indeed they are literally from different species!) they don’t seem to be much connected to each other.

I chose the title of this photo after long thinking: “the bird”. Somehow that bird is the center of this photo. It’s like as if everything is related to it, it’s a pillar that holds all the elements together. It’s small, but is the “punctum” of the photo.

I like this photo beyond what I just said. Somehow, it feels “perfect” to me. I rarely come close to this feeling. I rarely feel that my work is near “perfection”.

I still cannot believe that I actually took this photo. It was totally an accident. I was walking with a group of friends on coastline and I almost shoot this photo while walking. I was so lucky…

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@6.3 | 1/125s | f/2.2 | ISO200 | Handheld

This was an almost dull shot of a broken branch fallen in the middle of the bushes. I figured that it could become more exciting if I rotate the photo and convert a fallen branch into a standing tree. Not bad, but still boring. It was green all over the place, a little bit too common to be noticed. Then I changed the colors and I liked the exotic result which you see here.

Now it looks as if this alien tree has grown in some extraterrestrial environment, perhaps in some remote planet in a distant galaxy.

Panasonic DMX-LX3 Leica 5.1-12.8@8.8 | 1/100s | f/2.5 | ISO100 | Handheld

I took this photo few hours ago and I keep thinking about it. why those leaves were crying?

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L@200 | 1/40s | f/11 | ISO800 | Handheld

This is how I feel tonight.

No comments.

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L@185 | 1/20s | f/4 | ISO5000 | Handheld (both photos)

Two versions of the same photo of “water waves”. Which photo do you prefer? Which one is more “realistic”?

The first photo has “realistic” colors but “unrealistic” angle of view. The second one is reverse: “unreal” colors with “real” angle of view.

Depending on “observer’s” vision, both of these photos can be arbitrarily realistic or unrealistic. Unless we are in a courtroom and the jury wants to use these photo for proving something, it simply does not matter how far a photo is from “reality” and which “reality” it is narrating.

Canon 5D MII EF24-70 f4L@80 | 1/640s | f/5 | ISO800 | Handheld

The title of John Szarkowski’s book has become part of my daily photographic experience. It has gone into my subconsciousness and I cannot help myself using it. Every photograph is either on the  realistic/documentary/objective side and is a “window” or is on expressionistic/fiction/subjective side and is a “mirror”. In other words, I as a photographer, can choose to “reflect the outside world on myself” or to “reflect myself on the outside world”. It’s true that these two are inseparable: every photograph is subjective and objective; realistic and expressionistic at the same time and pure “realistic” photographs exist no more than pure “expressionistic” ones. However most of the times a photograph has a tendency toward one of these extremes.

This brings the discussion to the above photograph. It is a photograph of “windows” and the title also confirms this. However I have injected some of my own reflections in these windows. This building in everyday life of people passing in front of it is not seen or felt as depicted in this photo. The windows perspective, angle, color, and depth has been altered. The reality of the building has been deformed.

Now the question is how I should categorize this photo. Is it more a “window” or a “mirror” photograph?

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L@200 | 1/250s | f/5.6 | ISO800 | Handheld

It was a crowded public square in a middle of a city. People were walking, sitting, eating, drinking, shopping all over the place. I was hanging out aimlessly, enjoying the happy peaceful mood of the crowd until I realized this middle-aged couple. I liked their tender, calm and sincere way of sitting beside each other in the middle of crowd. They were good friends, but not overtly sentimental. To me they had that magical “right” amount of friendship, deep enough to stay silent and cool and strong enough to gently hold on to each other. No overreaction, no underaction… just deeply gentle, passionate, and peaceful.

I liked them, I liked their moment.

Canon 5D MII EF70-200 f4L@200 | 1/10s | f/32 | ISO100 | Handheld

This is an extremely expressionistic photograph of couple of trees which I took in last Autumn. It is almost impossible to tell the trees or their leaves. You may think that “well! you have played a lot with the photo in Photoshop”. But, although I am totally OK with processing photos in Photoshop, this photo is not altered or edited, aside from color-tonal changes. The extremist manipulations has happened during the shooting of this photo. As an experiment, I decided to shoot with low shutter speed in the day light. I also intentionally moved my hands during the duration of exposure. This leads to the weirdest result. Marvelous colors and distorted shapes.I hope you enjoy it too.

For me, this is like a new terrain to explore “abstract” photography: shooting with low shutter speed with controlled camera movements

Note: This photo is published in response to this post from Roland which is about the same topic.

Canon 20D EF24-70 f2.8L@45 | 1/250s | f/7.1 | ISO100 | Handheld

Contrast is not necessarily created by light work. Of course putting darkness against lightness can create contrast, however contrast has another dimension as well: the semantic contrast i.e. creating meaningful contrast by putting two opposing objects against each other. In this photo, I have tried to create this form of contrast. The extreme underexposed area (the rock) represents “night” and the normally exposed sea with the conspicuous “sun” over it represents “day”.

There are more visual or semantic contrasts as well:

the “raged” layout of the rock against “smoothness” of the sea.

the “limitedness” of the rock against the “unboundedness” of sea.

the “static-lifeless” rock against “dynamic-liferich”  sea.

…

…

Filed under: free subject Tagged: contrast, dark, day, light, night, sea, semantic, semantic contrast, sun, white ]]> http://1akkas.com/2011/07/23/dawn/feed/ 0 خودم dawn || Canon 20D EF24-70f2.8L@45 | 1/250s | f/7.1 | ISO100 | Handheld http://1akkas.com/2011/07/21/moving-out-2/ http://1akkas.com/2011/07/21/moving-out-2/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:07:16 +0000 bamdadi http://1akkas.com/?p=623 ]]>

Canon 5D MII EF24-105f4L@45 | 1/60s | f/4.5 | ISO1600 | Handheld

I was on the stairs waiting for a good moment. I waited and waited. It was not a crowded metro station. Several folks passed by, but I didn’t like the combination. They simply did not match with the scene. Finally, this young lady came and suddenly the scene was shining!

My few minutes waiting had paid off.

Filed under: people Tagged: b&w, city, girl, lady, lights, metro, moving out, underground, urban, walk ]]> http://1akkas.com/2011/07/21/moving-out-2/feed/ 3 خودم moving out http://1akkas.com/2011/07/21/the-sidewalk/ http://1akkas.com/2011/07/21/the-sidewalk/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:39:15 +0000 bamdadi http://1akkas.com/?p=617 ]]>

Canon 5D MII EF24-105f4L@105 | 1/80s | f/4 | ISO4000 | Handheld

I had a little dilemma during “title selection” for this photo.

This is a photo of a wet sidewalk with some color/tones/levels adjustment. Because most of the visually visible things in this photo are colors and textures and not many “recognizable” objects are visible, the photo can be considered an “abstract” one (compared to a more realistic photograph of a “sidewalk”). It is of’course still essentially a sidewalk photograph, but it moves beyond it by paying less attention to the familiar “sidewalk” elements and emphasizing on colors, textures and lines.

Canon 5D MII EF70-200f4L@200 | 1/1000s | f/8 | ISO100 | Handheld

Please take a moment and observe this photograph. What do you see?

Nothing special? A vast meaningless black space with some scattered sources of light and a big explosion-like thing  in the middle. “So what?”, you may ask.

If you (same as me) are interested in “learning to see”, you need to take photographs seriously. Even the ones that may look bad or worthless. You can learn a lot by thinking “what exactly is wrong about this photo?” or “why I don’t like this photo?’. Only after paying attention and carefully observing a photograph, you may be able to criticize it or admire it or both.

Again what do you see in this photograph? I see lot of leaves and a photographer hiding behind a bush while facing the camera toward the other side of the bush which is sunny. That explosion-like thing is actually the daylight, coming through the spaces between the leaves.

But I also see another scene in this photograph.

I see an airplane flying over thousands of small lakes while the distant sun is setting. As the plane moves, the image of the sun is shaped in one of the little lakes and is visible from the airplane and through the lens of the photographer. That explosion-like thing is the sun itself, or to be precise, its image. If you look carefully, you can even see the image of the clouds in one of the lakes.

How do you like a photograph that can take you from a hidden corner behind bushes into the open sky?

Canon 5D MII | 1/160s | f/5 | ISO400

Today I did a bit of housekeeping in my photoblog. I changed the theme and added cool widgets in the footer area (can you see them?) and updated several pages. I feel better now!

I am not really posting chronologically here. I open my photo-catalog, move inside it randomly for half an hour or so. Taking my time and enjoying with old memories and everything. Then I pick a photo. It can be from yesterday or yesteryear or …

What does this photo tell you? From one side it looks positive, after all the trash bin is full which indicates how people have done their best to keep the NY city clean. But this overwhelming amount of waste (metaphorically) cannot be good. No way it can be good.

Maybe not the best way to advertise SONY, but I hate it when people dump their used batteries like this.

The way I see it, this photo is full of extreme semantic contrasts.

For instance: The saturated colors of the graffiti (synthetic) against fresh natural green of the little plant.

A flipped view of a city (in this case Athens).

This is (like all other photos in this blog) a no-setup photograph.  By no-setup, I mean that I did not ask the photographer and the dog to pose like this. However I have rotated the photograph. Could you tell from the beginning?

Some how this is me, a fish in black waters.

I was on the stairs to have some elevation. Then this gentleman came and stopped in the middle of the scene. He was so busy looking down at his documents. One moment when he was preparing to leave, he looked up and saw me focusing on him with all my senses. Clearly he did not expect it, but did not complain either.

Because of the eyes, I like this photo more compared to the other ones (the one in which he is looking down).

Yeah, I know. We are in summer now.