superficiel in depth

First timer with Picasa : I made a photo album with the Google app. Quite useful and so quick to edit, tag and upload..
I've no excuses to be lazy anymore.. Although I think I should play around with the contrasting tool : the picts look a bit overexposed online.
The major drawback of course is that I'm not hosting my pictures anymore, plus the overall design of the album page is very.... Google like.
But publishing my picts only one month after I came back from holidays, it must be a personal record.. so yeye!
(I still haven't even developed the film roll - those picts are taken with my Nokia in the 1st part of my holiday trip in Naples and Rome).

Here's one of my favorite - taken in Pompei, it looks like a washed Rothko... but it's just a wall.



--Joëlle

Labels: Naples, Photography, Picasa, Pompei, Rome

Friday night lights is an american TV show that ran for 3 seasons. It follows the life of people in a small Texas town that beats at the rhythm of the local highschool football team: Friday night is the night where the only place in town that resonates is the stadium. I like it as everybody else does because it seems very realistic and human. And after all, it talks about everything but football in some way. After 2 seasons, the show was doomed to stop and a new kind of production deal that involved a cable TV (DirectTV) + a national TV (NBC) managed to get the show going for 13 more episodes so the stories of the main characters were offered some sort of conclusion. In order to advertise for the show, DirectTV posted some pictures of the characters on their website (I didn't seem them there anymore). The way the pictures were staged is very interesting: everything is said about the characters, the story is in place and there's a sexy edge to it that put a new light on the show so you want to watch it. But that's a trick. None of the people in this show is really sexy, they're not cool. You don't want to emulate them, but you do care for them. Maybe that's why the show failed to be more popular: viewers would hope it to be one more sexy soap opera show while it's all about the dullness, boredom, mediocrity of daily life, where the next morning looks like the one before, except on Friday night and except for the small pleasures brought by love, friendship and passion. At one point in the second season, the show tried to be more soapie for a tiny bit (there was a murder!) but that's actually when it got boring and fortunately the writers understood that for the last season.

Labels: daily life, football, Friday night lights, Photography, TV

Last Saturday, on a late afternoon, I strolled in the 9th and the 18th districts of Paris, in a way I didn't do for a while. Just walking up the streets, not really knowing why or where, just for the pleasure of being in the moment. I looked at people, at windows shops, at the general romantic atmosphere of Paris in winter, on a Saturday. And then just as the chance has it in for you, I came across an art gallery I had seen before but forgot. It was an exhibition of Diane Arbus magazine works. The great idea of the commissioner wasn't about showing framed pictures, but the magazine clippings themselves, where sometimes you could read the first paragraphs of the cover story. In context, the photographs were more daring and rule-breaking than they ever were. You could really understand how they set at the time a before and after. A couple of works by Wolfgand Tillmans, Walker Evans, Annie Leibovitz and others were also there to depict the heritage. It was a simple, moving, enlightening exhibition. It was a stranger encounter in the middle of my urban wandering.

Labels: Diane Arbus, Exhibition, Paris, Photography, Strolling

This year I mainly traveled to Scotland and Japan.
Here are selected pictures of those two trips.
"You got the look" shows digital color pictures from Scotland, my vision of the RockNess festival that took place last June near Inverness (I still have a folder of black and white pictures I took with my Contax throughout my stay earlier this year but I didn't have the time to make a proper selection - will take care of that soon).
"Summer stroke" is a look at the first part of my stay in Japan with hints at beach time in Kamakura, a beautiful day-walk in Fushimi-Inari temple in Kyoto with Julie and a short visit to Manabe-Jima.
"Looking for the shadow" shows the last days I spent in Japan between Takayama in the mountains and saying goodbye to friends in Tokyo.
For those 3 sets, I used the flash automated gallery from Photoshop CS3 for a change, it's quite a time-saver, but probably less satisfying because I couldn't really annotate the pictures as I usually do.

--Joëlle

Labels: Japan, Photography, Rock Ness, Scotland

Yesterday, I had the 4 film rolls I made in Japan processed and digitized on cd-rom. It's always a bit disappointing to check out the result of digitized film photography. it's clearly not meant to be scanned, or maybe it shouldn't be done in an automatic process, but then here we talk about a different kind of costs.
Before I take the time to put a larger selection online, I picked a sample of pictures to illustrate the different moments of my journey.

Kamakura beach



Fushimiinari temple, Kyoto



Tomoko and I in Pontocho, Kyoto - photo taken by Julie



Namba district, Osaka



Santora youth hostel beach, Manabe - Jima



Hida Folk Village



Interior of a house, Sogen-ji temple, Takayama



Hirayu Onsen



--Joëlle

Labels: Japan, Photography, Traveling

Last fall and last winter, I traveled to Japan and to Israel, along with small trips here and there.
It took me some time to develop the pictures, select them, put them online. Now it's done.
I hope you'll enjoy the 3 different sets, without music this time. I invite you to set your own mood and let me know what fit well according to you.
The first set, In the garden of light and dark, follows some of my paths into the Japanese gardens I went to film for my Abstract project.
The second set, Faces and shadows, introduces you to some of the incredible people I met in Japan, along with faces of strangers I just glanced at.
The third set, Color me good, starts in the Sinaï where I went to spend holidays with Bertrand and Martin and back in Israel where the Mitzpe Ramon crater and the Dead Sea offered strange colors to catch.
All pictures were taken with my Contax T2, except for the pictures taken in Normandy from the last set that were shot with my Lomo camera.

Finally, I chose to use my Flickr account to only host the pictures I take with my camera phone. It's not always significant but I find some of the results interesting, especially the ones with light effects.

--Joëlle

Labels: Flickr, Israel, Japan, Photography, Traveling