Lumière d’Argent

I just realized I never mentioned I participate to a collective photo blog called Stills. This is thanks to Colin’s kind invitation and turns out to be a great experience.

It is a successful (in my opinion at least) experiment at photo critique and discussion. We all learn and get way beyond the dreaded ‘Good shot!’.

What made me realize I never mentioned it is that I just created a new gallery on this site with the collection of pictures I am posting on Stills. It is a series of old shots I made in an abandoned and now destroyed coke factory.

This picture has not been published yet and so is not in the gallery. It was taken during the first visit I made on the site.

Stephane :: Dec.28.2007 :: Locations, Photography, Pictures :: 2 Comments »

I sweared I would not do it again unless it would be in a known gallery where people come without being told to. Because, you know, un unknown photographer in an unknown gallery is not going to draw too much attention. And doing those things is too much work to get in a month half the number of people who come here each day…

But a conspiracy made of my girlfriend and our good friends at La Cour de Récré managed to make me say yes again. So there, it will be held next Saturday, at La Cour de Récré. It will be part of a book signing session by the great Jacques Danois. The whole event is under the Unicef umbrella. Jacques used to be a big guy at Unicef and still does all he can to help.

Stephane :: Oct.21.2007 :: Locations, Photography, Pictures :: No Comments »

Or so they say.

Funny, then, that good photographers like Paul Butzi devotes no less than six (6!) lengthy posts on his blog to just the metering system on his digital camera. And these six posts just follow one where Paul derides people who equate good photography with a good camera. Go figure.

A fair share of post on Colin Jago’s blog is devoted to his Leica. A great camera if there is one, and a great photographer too.

Mike Johnston, on his own blog goes on and on about how seemingly almost any camera is badly designed.

And these are the blogs I find interesting! Mike’s blog is about his feeling of the day around photography, and Paul and Colin are primarily artists, not the like to be interested in gear first!

I don’t really understand many of those posts. Cameras have never been that good. We never had such a choice, new or second hand. I find most of those writings mere repeats of what was written all along the last six decades.

I started this blog to describe my digital photography adventure after I decided to switch. Lately my rhythm of posts went sharply down, for a number of reasons (new job, moving, photo projects) but it never was frantic to start with. Main reason: there is very little to write. The gear part of photography is quite uneventful for me. Most of what I learned with film still works the same, the gear itself and associated computer, software and printer are just working along. Digital B&W printing was an adventure four years ago, it is not anymore. Photo processing software was a challenge for computers a few years ago, not anymore. Digital cameras were maybe once strange beasts with all sorts of problems, I don’t find anything serious with the ones I use now.

When I started this blog I thought I would report on how my different lenses work, what I did for this or this. Well, there is not much to report: the lenses are plenty good enough, I sometimes think of replacing one or another for some minor improvements, but not for any design flaws or insufficient quality.

After seven months of using only digital, the single biggest change it brought to me was freeing time for picture taking and allowing me to start studio portraiture. So this blog will probably go on, but it won’t be about my digital photography thing, it will be about what I do with photography.

Now, about that name…

Stephane :: May.19.2007 :: Photography :: No Comments »

This article on Michael Reichmann Luminous-Landscape site tells it exactly like I would if I was as articulate. It is one of those pseudo universal truths repeated too many times.

Stephane :: Dec.18.2006 :: Photography :: No Comments »

I am finishing to read the last edition of ‘Correspondance New-Yorkaise’ of Depardon. It is in a book called ‘New-York’ and takes the form of a longish but interesting interview of Depardon by Alain Bergala.

For those who never heard of this, in Summer 1981, the french paper Libération sent photographer Raymond Depardon to New-York for the month of July with the mission to send one photo per day, everyday, in print. Depardon did so and annotated each photo with some thoughts he had that day, related or not to the photo. Those annotations were faithfully printed in the paper with the picture. This has now become a classic work in photography and might very well be the first ever photo blog.

Stephane :: Nov.03.2006 :: Photography :: No Comments »