Friday, October 29, 2010

Facing the other way

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Summer festivity


In Portugal, during Summer, almost every town or village will have some religious festivity in honour of a local patron saint. These events are colourful, noisy and a good opportunity for using a discrete camera like the E-P2, even at night, despite its high ISO limitations.

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Kings of the world


The girl above is our 6 year old daughter. She likes all things pink, all things Hello Kitty (TM) and hiking up mountains.

The boy next to her on the photo below is our 3 year old son. He wants to be a "super-strong super-hero" when he grows up.

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Monday, October 18, 2010

Mizarela's Slit

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Probably the most visited spot in Serra da Freita (see previous post) is the 75-meter-tall waterfall you see in the image, called Frecha da Mizarela (Mizarela's Slit).

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Serra da Freita

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Serra da Freita is a small mountain range in Northern Portugal. It is only about 70 km (43 miles) away from Porto (Portugal's second largest city). Even though this part of the country is densely populated, Freita's upper plateau is an incredibly deserted and calm location, providing a (false) feeling of distance from the modern world.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The cave


The Mira de Aire Caves are the largest in Portugal. A portion is open for tourist visitation.
Some of the stone formations look so "organic" that H.R. Giger's nightmarish art comes to mind.

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Monday, October 11, 2010

Henri Cartier-Bresson


Just bought "An Inner Silence, the Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson." It is good to be able to periodically look at those images. Most of them are slightly blurred and grainy portraits of people who, in most cases, are not even looking at the camera. They are caught in the middle of something: a conversation, a moment of silence, a private meditation, an instant when they were not aware the photographer was pressing the shutter button. Even when someone is looking straight at the camera, he/she looks absent, as if his/her eyes just happened to momentarily look in that direction. HCB did not like posed portraits.

He also did not like close-ups. The people he portrays, most of them well known in the art world of the time, are always shown in a context. A bookshelf, a painting, a curtain, a tapestry, a mask, a street lamp, there is always something else in the frame that makes a lot of sense, that had to be there.

All photos are taken under available light only.

That's all there is to making exceptional portraits: sense of timing and placement. It is not the large aperture lens, the backdrops, the strobes, the diffusion boxes. If it only were that simple...

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The last day of Summer (III)

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

These last three posts have the same title as a photography book by Jock Sturges and a song by The Cure. Both are worth a look.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The last day of Summer (II)

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

The last day of Summer (I)

Olympus E-P2 + Panasonic Lumix 20/1.7