It's reasonably cool inside the cave. The light is comfortably soft. The windows are protectively small and keep away all the intrusive excess of contrast which characterizes summer light. Everything is excessive in summer. If one prefers nuances, cold colours, delicate and gradual evolution of tones…well one can forget it until the beginning of autumn.
Summer light is violent and merciless and lays bare all details, like summer temperatures undresses bodies. Summer light doesn't like photography.
There was a time when taking photos was complicate and difficult and it needed a long preparation, then cameras became a little more accessible and vaguely more sophisticated, but still people thought that the sun was the amateur photographer's best friend and imposed to their patient models ( usually groups of relatives, who wished to have a memory of some family gathering) to stand in front of the brining light of sun, keeping their eyes open; the more sun there was the best the photo could come out, people usually thought.
I'm straying from the topic, I always do that. I'm too wordy when I write. Maybe it's to balance the fact that I'm basically silent. I was telling you of my cave.
Obviously it's an imaginary cave. There is not any rocky wall where I might sketch amazingly beautiful scenes of hunting at the dancing and unreliable light of a fire. There is not any leftover of bear skin which putrefies in a corner. And I'm not a troglodyte. It's just a slightly snobbish metaphor I have started using to describe my 'buen retiro' where I voluntarily and joyfully seclude myself, when a majority of people feel compulsory obliged to spend most of time outdoors.
I feel vaguely ill at ease, because I'm realizing that very probably I'll speak of myself, while I'm more and more reluctant to show myself. I have decided to stop taking self-portraits and I don't miss that. I have taken several self-portraits in the past years, when I tried to work on various photographic techniques and I was the only model I had always at my disposal. I have learnt a little how to use light, how to compose a scene; I have played with my own image in a hopefully quite self-ironical way. There is not any reason left which pushes me to keep on. This world explosion of selfies, has given me an impellent wish to take the opposite direction.
I have found out by chance that the word "Selfie" is a relatively new gift which we owe Australia. Something to add to boomerang, Uggs boots, dual flush toilet, Didgeridoo and Pavlova.
I still think that Didgeridoo is classier than selfies.
I'm elderly and ancient, so I still feel a deep respect for concrete books, dictionaries and semantics. I always check words' definition to be sure I can fully grasp their essence.
Selfie : an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.
How ancient I am. I have never felt the appeal of social networks. But there is logic. There is always logic. Simply too often I'm unable to find it. Maybe people are not interested in showing a photographic composition; they want to show themselves and the quicker it's the better.
No doubts, by now, I'm troglodytic because of my lack of skills for quickness and suddenness. I need slowness. Maybe I'll come back to this subject, another time…with calm .
Summer light is violent and merciless and lays bare all details, like summer temperatures undresses bodies. Summer light doesn't like photography.
There was a time when taking photos was complicate and difficult and it needed a long preparation, then cameras became a little more accessible and vaguely more sophisticated, but still people thought that the sun was the amateur photographer's best friend and imposed to their patient models ( usually groups of relatives, who wished to have a memory of some family gathering) to stand in front of the brining light of sun, keeping their eyes open; the more sun there was the best the photo could come out, people usually thought.
I'm straying from the topic, I always do that. I'm too wordy when I write. Maybe it's to balance the fact that I'm basically silent. I was telling you of my cave.
Obviously it's an imaginary cave. There is not any rocky wall where I might sketch amazingly beautiful scenes of hunting at the dancing and unreliable light of a fire. There is not any leftover of bear skin which putrefies in a corner. And I'm not a troglodyte. It's just a slightly snobbish metaphor I have started using to describe my 'buen retiro' where I voluntarily and joyfully seclude myself, when a majority of people feel compulsory obliged to spend most of time outdoors.
I feel vaguely ill at ease, because I'm realizing that very probably I'll speak of myself, while I'm more and more reluctant to show myself. I have decided to stop taking self-portraits and I don't miss that. I have taken several self-portraits in the past years, when I tried to work on various photographic techniques and I was the only model I had always at my disposal. I have learnt a little how to use light, how to compose a scene; I have played with my own image in a hopefully quite self-ironical way. There is not any reason left which pushes me to keep on. This world explosion of selfies, has given me an impellent wish to take the opposite direction.
I have found out by chance that the word "Selfie" is a relatively new gift which we owe Australia. Something to add to boomerang, Uggs boots, dual flush toilet, Didgeridoo and Pavlova.
I still think that Didgeridoo is classier than selfies.
I'm elderly and ancient, so I still feel a deep respect for concrete books, dictionaries and semantics. I always check words' definition to be sure I can fully grasp their essence.
Selfie : an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.
How ancient I am. I have never felt the appeal of social networks. But there is logic. There is always logic. Simply too often I'm unable to find it. Maybe people are not interested in showing a photographic composition; they want to show themselves and the quicker it's the better.
No doubts, by now, I'm troglodytic because of my lack of skills for quickness and suddenness. I need slowness. Maybe I'll come back to this subject, another time…with calm .
