lucian stănescu - my photography

the right wrong place

2010-07-06T00:17:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, the whole of Belgium went to the streets. It wasn't political unrest, it wasn't an eco-demo, it was more than that... the Tour de France, one of the world's biggest sporting events, had it's second stage of the 2010 edition finishing in Brussels. And being a bike-crazy nation, they all went to the streets to live this moment :)

Over 2,5 million people gathered along the course which took the riders from Rotterdam to Brussels. We too went to see it, although I'm not a big fan of big masses. Nowadays so many sporting events are seen so much better on TV... but to pay respect to these riders, their effort and the event in itself, we went.

We decided to stay somewhere close to the finish line, to witness the drama of the final sprint. Well, that's what half of the population of Brussels seemed to want, so there were tons of people everywhere. The only chance to actually see something was to be invited to a VIP area or have someone's shoulders to climb to.

I think everyone who goes to see such a bike race for the first time in his life doesn't realize how quickly everything's over. The peloton races past you with around 40km/h, that's not even a whole minute for you to enjoy the view. And towards the finish, they of course go way faster, but then again the pack is stretched out and you get to see a bit more of it.

From a photographic point of view, our standing point was of course useless. I don't even like it to try to take photos at big events covered by pros who take positions hours before, on accredited locations and so on. For me, it's either smaller events, where I stand a smallest chance, or bigger events but then with an accreditation. And the possibility to learn a lot :)

Yesterday though was another example of "take your camera everywhere with you". I had my girlfriend up on my shoulders and she was telling me what was going on, since all I could see were some necks. And then, after a first small group rushes by, I see a head with a helmet slowly going past us... "Hon, what's this guy doing?". "He...seems to have crashed. And lost his bike." Only later (on tv) were we to find out about the many crashes that had taken place. Luckily no one was seriously injured. And here in front of us we had Lloyd Mondory, from AG2R La Mondiale, walking towards the finish line. We felt sorry him, as for the other fallen riders, and today, as I'm writing this, there were some more crashes on the second etappe from Brussels to Spa.

So what do we learn? Yeah, always keep your camera with you, find a spot "above" the rest if possible (or at least with a good view) and... see what happens. It's not a great pic, of course, but it captures a moment, a situation, which has a relation to the beginning of this year's tour. Ok for now.

After that we went for a drink with our friend Marius "The-Bio-Racer", who'll start his own Tour of Europe later this month, driving from Belgium to Romania. Big up, mate!

5D, what lens?

2010-06-20T15:33:00.001+02:00

while trying to keep this blog as little as possible about "tech&gear", issues arise from time to time which need to be addressed :)

so is the story about the canon 5d mark2... when it came out, I too was amazed, like everyone else. I wondered what lenses I would need if I decided to make this step, especially since I shoot wide-angle a lot and the lens I use on my 30D wouldn't (really) fit - well, not on it's entire focal length. and almost every single article I could find would tell you how important it is to get the expensive L glass, nothing less. and they wrote this so convincingly, that stupid me really started believing them... a simple google search will mainly reveal offers with the 50/1.4, 85/1.2, 24-70/2.8 and alike expensive glass.

so I thought: finding ~2000euros for the body will be hard enough, where the $%^& would I get the rest from? oh just screw it!

2 years later or so, still happy with my "old" camera (geez, time has gained some speed these days, hasn't it?), a friend made an offer I couldn't refuse. and more-or-less overnight found myself owning the infamous camera. the box rested near my desk for a few days, I felt I don't deserve it yet... but then I opened it, making no special effort in deserving it, put on my 50mm f/1.8 and clicked away. and loved it. and clicked some more.

then I went out and bought the 35mm f/2, and loved it even more. and both seemed so wide! I put aside the search for the 24mm, and have only once used my tokina 12-24mm f/4 at it's 24mm end when I needed the width at a concert.

and I keep looking at the pictures and don't understand where the loss of quality should be... for the normal user. so if google ever indexes this and you stumble upon it and read through here, these are my words: don't be afraid of less expensive lenses! the most important thing, in my opinion, is to have some gear so you can go out and do your thing. it's useless waiting to buy the "right" gear and getting old by then...

bloggering

2010-06-09T22:09:00.001+02:00

oi! I'm back!

well I wasn't really away, anyway, but other people here in this family have more important things to do on this computer than checking rss feeds and facebook games. take diana, for example. initially, she used to be here. then, all of a sudden, she started this 59 kilo project. and now she's giving interviews here. industrious girl, isn't she?

well, yeah. and since she really needs this computer again now, I'll just point you to this other blog post here, which comes to confirm "our" theory here about mainly shooting in M-mode. if you do read romanian blogs about photography, you already know andrei pandele. if you don't know him... no, that's really impossible. if you do understand romanian and don't read his blog yet... well, you get it!

back in a couple of days, take care

tree

2010-05-09T21:30:00.000+02:00

just found this picture with the tree which I think is very timburton-esque. taken back in resita, banat around christmas...

lenswork podcast

2010-05-06T21:32:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to make sure you know Brooks Jensen's podcasts over at lenswork... they're a constant source of inspiration to me.

grounded...

2010-04-17T15:57:00.000+02:00

rafael is looking for some rerouting flights to get to thailand in time to meet a friend there... hope you made it, mate!

lots of people had to change their travelling plans when airports around europe started to shut down on thursday due to Eyjafjallajokull, a volcano in Iceland.

P or M or...?

2010-04-11T00:20:00.002+02:00

...so I was telling you the other day about me trying to shoot only in M(anual) mode, in order to think more and become wiser and, in the end, take better pictures.

but as things go in life, and especially in photography, I found others to be of a different opinion. look at this interesting piece of advice on Tewfic El-Sawy's blog, who says exactly the opposite. before quoting him, let me tell you that Tewfic El-Sawy has a very interesting blog which you should add to your rss-reader if you're intro photojournalism+travel. he also organises photo expeditions which seem very interesting to me...

ok, so Tewfic says: "I frequently advise participants in my Photo~Expeditions to set their cameras on the P setting during the first couple of days of the trip, to compensate for the jet-lag fatigue, and for the sudden disorientation we all experience in a new unfamiliar environment, especially if it's at a bustling heart-pumping festival." and "So my advice is when you're not getting the exact result you seek from a particular scene for whatever reason, set your camera on P and let it rip."

his thoughts are interesting and well-worth taking into account. his post was inspired by this interview with Harry Benson published on gadgetwise, a blog of nytimes. the interview in particular didn't really inspire me, I think it's more of a sort of how-to article done by mainstream publications, where "how to loose weight", "how to raise your children", "how to get back with your ex" and "how to take better low light photos" all come in one page and are aimed at a certain public. the comments below the interview sum this up rather well. and they also contain some more valuable info, so check them :)

so there you have two great photographers telling you to trust your camera's processor and software and concentrate on the important things, like the subject. do it with feeling :)

the end?

2010-03-26T16:22:00.007+01:00

so adobe creative suite 5 is coming out and the net's full of discussions, of course. and there is this preview video about a new tool called "content aware fill"...

seems like the end for many jobs, if it's for real, doesn't it? and for watermarking, as one reader rightly points out. so what will cs6 bring, in a couple of years? the end of photography?

i'm off on holiday for a week, couldn't bother less, working on new website, new camera, interesting new projects. you take it easy and take care :)

later edit: thanks to Stefan Jora who sent me this link, which shows how much more there is to this content aware fill in CS5 :P

this blog

2010-03-10T08:56:00.001+01:00

So I promised to come back and tell you a few more things on this project which started the blog. In the meantime, I decided I would continue the blog, now without a particular project in mind… other than having a blog on photography and trying to become a photographer. And this being a blog, and me being me, we're already way behind schedule with this post…

About the "take and post a picture every day" project…it all started with the recommendation of a tutor: "use your camera every day!". When I started complaining that there weren't so many interesting things happening in my life every day worth picturing, he told me: "if you'd know how many pics I've taken of my toes in bed, in the morning…".

I was later criticized for making a blog out of it, should've remained a silent, personal exercise they said… but me being me, I knew I needed some "external" pressure to keep this project going. So I started posting them here…

And it was a truly great experience. I feel I've evolved on both a technical and an "artistical" level. I don't see myself as an artist, but I've learned a lot of "seeing" in these five months.

When deciding to start this project, I had noticed I was too often shooting in P-mode (program), i.e. automatic settings chosen by the camera. And this ruined several pictures on an important trip, so the technical exercise started being about only shooting in M-mode. It keeps your mind going, it makes you take a different look at the world around, and, most important, it makes (you take) better pictures…

I have a 9 to 5 job where I cannot use the camera. So I often had to rely on the few hours left in the morning and evening to find that daily picture. Sure enough, there have been times when I "cheated", took a picture of my dinner plate and that was it… luckily I have a talented girlfriend who knows how to make dinner plates look wonderful (and gorgeously tasty), so you might have not noticed the cheat :P

But in these few hours I had left, I took the camera with me everywhere, something I had stopped doing years ago. And I learned to look and see, and I think this is the most valuable thing I take with me from this project. It has now become a constant exercise for me. I know these are things from the textbooks for beginners in photography, but I am so glad to have rediscovered them for myself… through this blog.

I now only shoot raw.

I want to shoot more on film, started experimenting with a Liubitel medium format and definitely want to process my own bw films.

In the next days I will try to put together a selections of images I like most from this period of time, as a conclusion to the project, and in the meantime will concentrate (and write here about) new personal projects but also other interesting photography related things found lying around…

world press photo part 3

2010-02-28T18:29:00.001+01:00

Ok, and now for the final part of this review...

Roderik Henderson shows this interesting series. You'd think anyone could take these, spending a few hours in the streets, at some traffic lights. They are haunting images... too bad Roderik doesn't tell us more about how they we're made, it's possibly a longer term project. His site is definitely worth visiting, I especially found his story in the about section amazing...

2nd prize in the portrait series on the other hand... I'm sorry, I can't make anything of this.

Women are heroes is an interesting project, too bad it only gets shown in the singles category.

Francesco Giusti finds a very nice story in Congo Brazzaville. Shows how one can have a good time even when times are rough. Inspiring people.

Joe Petersburger amazed me with his photo of a hunting kingfisher seen from below the water surface. Very well done! Waiting for his website to come back from under construction, the preview of other images by him shows some amazing work.

Another awesome nature series comes from Paul Nicklen. There's hardly more I could say about this... go spend a couple of hours on his website, it's so well worth it!

Now this is another series we could try our hands at. Peter Bialobrzeski finds this rather easily-available idea and shows it in a nice way...well done! Note to self: keep looking.

And now to this, which is one of the series that will stay with me for a while. David Chancellor comes across this amazing story, where villagers in Zimbabwe find the carcass of a fallen elephant and reduce it to bones in just two hours. But it is not only the photos which impressed me, but the story in itself, the people, the meat, the dogs, the traces... speechless.

This was about it, a selection of singles or series I found to be memorable in this years World Press Photos.

2010-02-19T00:26:00.001+01:00

dinner with friends...

world press photo part 2

2010-02-17T23:24:00.005+01:00

so let's continue viewing the winning photos at this year's world press photo.

- very nice series by Craig Golding here about the World Master Games, such amazing pictures and people.

- Elizabeth Kreutz brings in an amazing series about the return of Lance Armstrong. But then again, I'm a sucker for almost everything related to Lance, so you could blame it on that if you don't like the pics. Hmmm, looking through them again, I think it's a great series regardless of it's subject. There, I said it! Now bow to this pic. :P

- and another big favourite, this series by Stepan Rudik (couldn't find a site or a portfolio, unfortunately). The photos bring an interesting subject into discussion: organized street fights. You might have seen videos on youtube about this before, now here is a well done photojournalistic approach. As much as I despise violence (why fights, why not sports?), I like this series and the approach... wish I would have found such a subject myself.
Later edit: I now read that the series has been disqualified from WPP due to a manipulation in one of the photos. Rules are rules I guess...

- on another note, I don't see much in this single photo by Pierre-Olivier Deschamps. Only after finding the whole series (and it wasn't easy!) did I get the meaning. Maybe it's just me, but that photo alone... just doesn't do it. But before we get all gritty here, click on to the next photo.

- wow... Stefano de Luigi really hits you with this one. I'm muted and still think I want a print of it...

- this series by Eugene Richards has already amazed me back in Perpignan, in summer. His books are on the top of my wishlist...

- another series on the hardcore side comes from Tommaso Ausili. Don't click if you're just about to go out for lunch. Or, actually, do click! Especially if you were in for a steak...

- the daily life category would merit a post on its own. I'll leave you with the links for now: Gihan Tubbeh about Adrian, 13-year old autist, Matt McClain about Pandu (make sure you see the whole story on Matt's website, with captions and more photos), and, why not, Pieter Ten Hoopen with a story on the town of Hungry Horse, Montana.

- and i'll stop here for now, there will be a part 3 post as well...

world press photo

2010-02-12T19:41:00.004+01:00

so, the world press photos 2010 just came in...

interesting, as every time. moving. shocking. too shocking? the blogs and forums will surely have things to chew on the next days.

there are things i like, and things i don't (doh!). a very first reaction would be to say there's too much blood and violence. would not showing it be an option? i can't say... i know these things happen for real, and people tend to forget about them. or rather tend not to care about them anymore, being bombarded with such news every day.

i'll stop here and show you a few things that caught my eye at a first glance.

- the winner photo? hmmm, i'm not so sure yet. the whole series i like, but that one photo alone, as the overall winner? not sure...

- i liked this series, by Olivier Laban-Mattei much more than the winning one.

- i liked the simplicity in this one, by Kent Klich. Only now do I realise he is the author of "Children of Ceausescu" as well.

- i could have done without this, this and this ones.

- i liked this series by Charles Ommanney a lot. i like it's sense of humour and the general feeling. bush's feet look weird in at least two shots :) too much obama for you this last year? maybe, i liked this series by Callie Shell a lot too, back in perpignan when i saw it.

- this of course made me think of andrei pungovschi's photo, too bad i can't give you the direct link (first in wanderings). from the same series, i liked this one a lot.

i'll leave the rest for an up-coming post, there's too much image in my head right now...

PS: i was glad to see stephan vanfleteren as a jury member, his photos are truly impressive!

day 154

2009-12-31T18:27:00.001+01:00

today's...lines.

and what better day to bring a project to end? the take-and-post-a-picture-every-day project ends hereby... it was not only great fun, but full of insights and findings and learnings, and i can only recommend it if you happen to be at that level I felt I was five months ago...

I'll let things settle and write a more thorough conclusion later in january. 'till then, have a nice fresh start and stay positive!

regards,
lucian

day 153

2009-12-31T18:14:00.000+01:00

yesterday's 20L of krautsuppn + hot home made plum brandy...

day 152

2009-12-31T18:09:00.000+01:00

tuesday's crunchy crib...

day 151

2009-12-31T18:04:00.000+01:00

monday's sisters...

day 150

2009-12-31T17:58:00.000+01:00

sunday's portraits...

day 149

2009-12-27T23:10:00.000+01:00

yesterday's pirouette...

day 148

2009-12-27T23:06:00.000+01:00

friday's profile...

day 147

2009-12-27T22:56:00.000+01:00

thursday's party people...

day 146

2009-12-27T22:41:00.000+01:00

wednesday's bat...

day 145

2009-12-27T22:38:00.000+01:00

tuesday's father and son...

day 14x

2009-12-27T22:29:00.000+01:00

monday no pic...shame

day 14x

2009-12-27T22:26:00.003+01:00

sunday no pic...shame