Weeks eighteen and nineteen.

Spring is here.

For those of you who use Path, on the latest update there are a couple of new filter options that I really like. I wouldn’t use them all day every day, but there are some nice effects there nonetheless. This is the “country” filter with a selective blur. Not bad for a telephone pretending to be a camera.

Week eleven is up.

Josh and I just posted week ten of the five•two•fifty-two project— we’re really pleased with how it’s turning out so far, and we’re looking forward to the next forty-two weeks.

Sometimes it takes a while to get these close-up shots just right. Not to mention the effort involved in getting enough light on my eye to show some colour. I love having black eyes but they do often look like lumps of coal in photos.

Week seven, the Istanbul edition, is up.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I hadn’t dug out the macro kit in quite a while.

Week five is live.

You know what’s up.

The weekly photographic episode is ready to go.

Week two is up.

Brand-new, often unshiny photo project featuring Josh Monk and myself here. Join us for fifty-two weeks of pixels galore.

Suffice it to say there was a lot of alcohol consumption going on.

This right here is why I love working with natural light.

The Sigma 10-20mm is slowly showing me the things it does. Others may not like its willingness to flare; I love it. The Rathaus never looked more spectacular.

Eberhard Ludwig: fierce.

The Stadtkirche, unfortunately closed to non-congregation.

They can’t close the outside.

Apparently I’m that guy who sneaks up behind you when you think you’re having a private moment.

Simple beauty in the marketplace.

The fountains in front of the 5M Migros, now celebrating its 10th year in Antalya.

I love how the Sigma turns portraits into bizarre caricatures.

I didn’t mean to imply that I don’t like the Sigma for landscapes. It’s awesome.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Sigma 10-20mm. I know a lot of people like to use it for landscapes but I think it’s a pretty sweet lens for getting up close.

I’ve recently purchased a new lens (pictures coming soon), but nothing will ever match the love I have for my VR.

Today I completed my year-long tenebræ self-portrait series, and I have to say, I have more respect than ever for people who do 365 self-portrait projects. I think of myself as the kind of person who likes to take self-portraits, but I ended up reassessing my initial aim for doing a 100 portraits in a year, and settled on 66 instead (yes, there is a significance to that number, kudos if you work it out). One thing I’ve learned: I’m not the type to be able to force selfies. From now on, I intend to take the freestyle approach and simply do them when the mood strikes me. I do like this set, though, which you can view in its entirety here.

Every time I explore blue, which isn’t very often, it makes me wonder why I steer clear of it so much. It’s really a lovely colour in the right light.

I was so excited to get my new (old) Helios 81N, that I ran outside and took photos with it before I realised that it was completely smudged up with fingerprints. Oops.

I kind of liked the results anyway.

I didn’t actually mean for this photo to look like it came out of a Lomo, but it just sort of turned out that way. I should get some new batteries for my real LK-A and run a couple of rolls of film through it for old times’ sake. I do love that camera.

Last week I was invited to participate in a photo project by Wrong Studio entitled Mediterranean Quilt. The ideas is for photographers living in seaside cities and towns in the 23 countries all along the Mediterranean coast to send in four “patches” (i.e. four square photographs) to contribute to the quilt. The project is open to anyone living on the Med, and the deadline for submissions isn’t until April, so there’s plenty of time for you to get something together and submit it. I put my submission in a couple of days ago and I’m pretty excited to see how this project turns out. Link

The set is coming along nicely. It’s here.

I ran across the Huebner Family Photos Flickr account quite by accident; it was one of those things where I was so deep into a trail of searching for things that I have no idea how I ended up where I did. But I’m so glad I found this account— if you have some spare time (and if you don’t, make some), their photo collections are well worth a look or three. Basically it seems they’re going through all their old family photos from the past half-century or so, many of which appear to be slides, and they’re converting them all to digital uploads. While that in itself might not be so interesting to anyone who isn’t in their family, where it becomes of interest is the fact that these people travel a lot, and they were traveling fifty years ago, too. They have nearly 4,000 photos up there at the moment, many of which are from Europe in the late 1950s, stretching all the way through to the present day. Also, they appear to be a family of very skilled photographers, which helps.

I can’t even describe how many different kinds of photos are there— you just have to go see it for yourself. The above photo was taken from my favourite set, Czechoslovakia 1988-89. I find that set particularly interesting because I was dating a Czech guy at that time, and it’s amazing to see that his descriptions of his homeland were so incredibly accurate.

I’ve been told by a very reliable source that this is just the beginning, and there are more sets of photos coming soon, including a set from Europe, dated 1961. Can’t wait to see those.