Personal photography
There is a scene in the animated series Archer where everybody is stuck in the elevator. Krieger, the mad scientist, is holding a Thermos bottle. Someone asks him: is that soup in there? And he answers in an enigmatic way: define “soup”.
I discussed wanting but failing to start a project lately. My conclusion was that if you can’t find an obvious project, one way of starting could be to choose a technology, a constraint, or a theme, then go out and take photos to see where it goes.
I was in Oslo lately (for work). So I decided to put that conclusion into practice. I decided:
Finally, I decided to experiment with a few techniques:
I’ve spent the better part of six months telling myself I need a photography project. The logic is sound: focused work develops technique faster than scattered shooting, sustained exploration reveals patterns in my visual thinking, and constraints paradoxically liberate creativity. Yet here I sit, project-less, waiting for something to ignite sufficient passion to sustain months of dedicated work.
Following my previous post about the obsession with details, photography genres require different ways of seeing and representing the subjects that I find hard to adapt to.
Did you like my attempt at YT-style clickbait? Seriously, there is no such thing. There is no perfect setup; there is no one way to do things; there is no best lens/camera/film. Only you can know what gear works for you given a set of circumstances. Let’s move on from that.
As I’m going to travel to Oslo, as I do a couple of times a year for work (I work for vikings), I thought I’d show my camera travel setup and explain my choices. Not because I do it better than anyone else and I have some magical knowledge of what is best, but just out of interest, because I like to know what people use for their own photography. Feel free to show me yours.
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time is: what will happen to my photos once I’m gone? I’m not talking about whether the actual images will still exist (hint: print). I’m talking about what will people do with them.
Warning: this is photography-adjacent only.
Sometimes I buy second hand books. Either on Amazon or on local markets. Mostly because when you buy a lot of books it becomes expensive. Especially photography books. And I need the money for photography and astronomy. On occasion, these books come from libraries that have closed or that have sold some of their stock of rarely borrowed books to replace them with books people prefer.
I love when these books still contain their date stamped lending cards.
I’m still trying to identify why I like Substack so much more than other social platforms. So navel gazing warning is in place.
One of the things that annoyed me with Substack is the fact that the various people writing on it do so for duplicates of themselves.
I’m not a street photographer. Part of it is that I live in the middle of nowhere and we don’t really have streets. I was in Paris at the weekend to visit my parents, so I experimented a bit.
During my last visit in Paris, I went to a Richard Avedon exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
