VSCO cam and VSCO film (and VSCO Grid)

I find myself in a funny predicament - I had shot very little film as a young boy (I loved taking pictures when my parents and I went to Thailand which was absolutely great) and I love film now - I've been shooting more and more since April when I got my M7 and what strikes me with film is how wonderful the feeling is to know that the image is crafted - not just made but crafter: I load the film myself, I carefully choose what to shoot, I rewind the film myself, I develop the film myself, and only then do I enter the more digital world of scanning. The development of the film is a pleasure like no other - loading it in the spool blindfolded, mixing the chemicals in the magical movement of stirring every minute (as if one brews a potion), and then pulling out the negative and looking at the pictures for the first time - it is like magic indeed. And every time, the film comes out to life with a passion - with a soul.

This is what a lot of digital photography isn't about - it tends to be about quick shooting of many pictures, and the plastic-ifying of colours and textures. And this is where some digital software comes into play to create effects that mimic the dynamics, the imperfections, and the colours of film. VSCO (Visual Supply) is a company that has been creating digital tools for the photographers who want to instill soul into their work. One of their more unusual products (VSCO Keys, which I am yet to try) is quite different from other digital tools in that it enables one to get closer to the grafting of the filme with their hands - with movements and typing - it is reminiscent of writing in which the real tool are the fingers and not the keyboard on which it is written. 

But it is not about VSCO Keys that I want to talk about but about their presets. In fact, not even about that, nor about VSCO Cam (Reloaded - which is an extraordinary deprture from other camera apps). I want to talk about their ambitious goal - to create beautiful things and to share them with the world - their VSCO Grid.

Their presupposition - when we were kids crafting - is what fills me with emotions - because photography for me is indeed about celebrating both the "beautiful" and the "broken" in life. Because we can be cynical but when we were kids, we were ballerinas - pure, elegant, spontaneous, playful ... - and that's what I aim for with my photography - to campture not the cynicism but the idealism, to encapsulate movement and dance without chains and restrictions, to translate darkness into light, to bend the borders of reality through a blend of realism and imagination, and to liberate the child hidden behind the mask of adulthood. To be pure. Thank you, VSCO!

You can visit my VSCO Grid at Traveller Between Spaces.

Shooting film along digital in Venice

A couple of months ago, I was in Paris. I walked smiling hand in hand with my darling. And we were loving the air - it was chilly but the sun was out and we happened upon a Leica boutique. The romantic idea of shooting film has been in my mind for months. I wouldn't have wanted to trade camera systems or to use a different approach when photographing - I just wanted to try the medium - to take away the temptation to check out the picture immediately after taking it, and to remove the thought of sharpness and picture quality that has been plaguing me. In other words *i* wanted to create my images - not leaving the job to my camera.

The Leica store had a number of second-hand cameras and among them was a relatively beat-up M7. I was assured it was fully functional and ready to go. And so the next couple of days in Paris were documented with it. It was a risky decision - I had never shot film (as a kid I did but we all this then - I hadn't shot film since I took up photography with the enthusiasm of a hobbyist), and I was clueless about its behavior and interaction with light. But I knew the camera system and the 35 mm Summicron was something I felt right at home with. The first 36 or so frames felt awkward - I didn't know what to do with the rewind knob, I had not acquired the muscle memory of rewinding after each shot, and I often felt surprised at how quiet the shutter was. The first film I used was Ilford FP4 and it took me some time to switch to the black-and-white mental mode but this wasn't such a foreign part considering I've shot with cameras with the black-and-white preview function on. And I enjoyed the process - when I got those pictures from the lab, I was excited like a kid - I rushed to my darling to show her our pictures.

Several weeks down, and a few more rolls, I am now also equipped to develop my own black-and-white film at home. And I was ready when we were planning a trip to Venice again. Arriving in Venice, I couldn't wait to leave the suitcase at the hotel. My girlfriend had the digital and I had the film. Parallel to that, I also had of course my iPhone. And there were a few pictures that I took both with the film and with the phone. The black-and-white pictures below were scans made with a dedicated film scanner (quite poor) with some additional noise applied to get rid of the artifacts from the poor scan; the color pictures are the iPhone pictures with a VSCO film preset.

Looking at those color pictures, I am transported into the context by the realism of the digital pictures - the sharpness creates flatness, the realistic color plunge us in the context, the composition does not drive the eye in any particular direction, the sunshine is tangible, and my memory is triggered. I have a sentimental connection to those color pictures - I am thrilled that they are realistic, that they can tell me where I took the picture, they can tell me the settings under which it was taken, they are a correct recording of my visual experience. But ...

And here's the "but" - when I took the film picture, I took it because I had an emotional attachment to the moment - I was screaming with happiness, I was internally experiencing tickle all over my sensory pleasure centers, I was seeing the world not through my eyes but through my mind - I lifted the camera and took a picture during a blink not because I wanted to take a picture but because I wanted to capture the feeling *i* was having - you can't capture a feeling on a two-dimensional silver-decorated plastic but that film picture is so removed from the reality that it becomes an abstraction - and it is an abstraction of my feeling in that moment:

The sharpness of the grains is like acceleration through space and time, the lack of color grinds the context to graphite abstraction, the composition draws the eye through stacks of lines, the sunshine is pure white distinguishing the hairs and the cracks through shades, and my memory... - I am experiencing the warmth of the sunshine, the smell of the sea weed, and the calls of the gondoliers. And I am there - hand in hand with my smiling darling.

Venice - one's got to love its poeticism

The poeticism of Venice is not that it is defying civil engineering, female pragmatism and the Continental business. The poeticism of Venice is that it knows it is on a deathbed and it still smiles as if it has just moved in the laguna.

Visit the gallery for the full set of pictures on film.

Photography is History

For well-over a month now, I've been using quite extensively the new Voithländer 35 mm f1.2 II lens. It is a superb lens - it is sharp, it is great to handle, it offers light sensitivity unbeatable in the 35 mm range, and fantastic contrast and color rendition. It is a fantastic black-and-white lens especially when paired up with the Leica M8's infrared sensitivity. And it made me think about what the lenses tell about the picture. 

We've often read about lenses that render vintage, or modern, or clinical, or that are great for color, or that offer surreal rendition, etc. The lenses that we use (figuratively and literally) create their own reality and have their own feel. That's what we refer to "vintage" when we talk about softer lenses. We use them because they capture our own expectation of the world back in those days - ghostly and desaturated. They have melancholic value because we want to live in that world - some of us, anyway. Their low contrast is for us a summary of a historic moment - calmed down, poised, and sometimes flatly boring. We become like the characters in "Midnight in Paris" who cannot live in their own time and look for a future or a past.

The lens is more than just a brush in the hands of the photographer. The lens is the intermediary inner eye, the intuition and the impulse. It is the brush but also the canvas on which we draw with light. It is the paint and the palette.  With a manual focus lens, the photographer is in absolute control of how impressionistic, Cezannian, Bensonian, Cartier-Bressonian, etc. the composition and appearance would be. Super-f lenses, opened to the fullest, gather light that can easily overwhelm the sensor – like a bucket of pain splashed on the canvas. These lensed are made for drawing at night – when each photon matters, when the human eye is not capable of seeing colors, and when people open up to you - by the fireplace, with a candle, under the fireworks.

Then we have a whole new world before our eyes. Colors and colorful people. Smiles and tears. Music and noise (no silence ever). Breath and stank. Toxicity and invigoration. Poets and lyrics. Begging for money and satisfaction without greed. Being of past, and present, and future. A Prokofiev and a Rachmaninov piano concerto – Bach doesn't fit at night but the Russian romantics and surrealists do. 

We are drawn to that world, as photographers. It is revealing, it is unseen. It is a secret. Perhaps, its allure is in its invisibility. Or maybe, photography is just the artist's attempt at escaping death, which often comes at night, in the dark, without us seeing. We all want our picture taken, our presence documented, our loved by our side. The fear of perpetual neglect is what has driven the artist for centuries. So what's so new with photography? Infinite reproducibility? And isn't it through photography that we try to live in another age? To move to the times which we like - recreating the ages, recreating the clothes, the make-up, recreate the greatest and most beautiful era. But isn't any one of them like that? Aren't we all trying to escape the present?

But life is a little unsatisfying. And that's why we need to document each and every part of it - the happy parts and the sad parts, the ones we want to forget and the ones we want to remember forever. But above all, we must document the ones we want to live in.

"What do your parents do?" - associations game

Do you actually know what your best friends' parents do? I mean for a living? Have you ever asked them and do you keep asking (if you haven't met them yet)? Is it just not something that our generation really cares about? 

I was just headed to brush my teeth and I saw in my cupboard two spare tooth-brushes. Now, I know one of them isn't mine (thankfully, I know whose it is and what it's doing there). The other one triggered a chain of associations of the strangest nature. I had acquired it as a spare one when I went to Cologne last winter to visit a very good friend who had just come back from the USA to spend Christmas with her family in Europe - Esther.

I was supposed to travel by train to Cologne, spent a couple of hours there with her and we were then supposed to travel by car back to Bremen. It was winter though - and this normally means "don't make precise plans if travelling" - even the German punctuality is not immune to train delays. And it took me about 2 hours more than planned to reach Cologne. No, wait - I didn't even reach Cologne. A part of the track (thankfully, along the final distance) was unreachable, so we were all unloaded at a local station near Cologne. So a couple of hours later and several attempts to really locate where I was and to communicate that to Esther if she could pick me up, we finally reunited: graciously, she came with the car, gave me the warmest hug, and we were on our way back to her parents' place. 

It was already dark outside, cold, snowy, and icy. Travelling back for 4-5 hours to Bremen wasn't really the best of ideas no matter how big and safe the car or its Continental tyres were. So, we went to her parents' place and decided to stay there overnight and travel back the next morning. We knew each other back from the university years when we spent hours and hours playing the piano together, walking around campus, talking about guys and gals, but mostly about music. And in every conversation, we plotted the most ambitious plans for 4-hand-1-piano concerts, playing everything from Chopin's Etudes (transcribed in one shape or another), through Brahms' Hungarian Dances, to our own compositions and interpretations. 

We park the car and we start walking towards a closed pharmacy. I wonder, is there some kind of a small side street for which I'd need to hold my breath (literally hold my breath)? But no - Esther pulls the keys from her pocket and gets in the pharmacy. I am delicate (I think) and didn't say "oh, I didn't know your parents ran a pharmacy", did I? I play along, I play cool. I find out, it is not something recent (i.e. I should have known about this). 

Where does the tooth-brush come in? Well, it is a pharmacy they run, and I was not prepared to stay overnight because we planned to travel back. So, in the words of Esther "At least with having the pharmacy, a tooth-brush is like the easiest thing to fix you up with."

When we make new friends, our generation no longer judges the social class of the person we meet by their parents' education or working status. Back in the days, one couldn't talk to someone whose parents were not approved of by our parents. Has the complexity of the job market altered so much that it is by now difficult to describe what our parents do ("teacher" is easy but what does it mean to be "market analyst"?). When I thumb through the pictures of my friends, I am having a hard time remembering ever having a conversation with them about their parents' jobs - divorses, culture, real estate, troubles with other children, pride of their children's successes ... - sure. But their job? That's a mystery.