statue
I have noticed an alarming personal trend of late, wherein I seem to be taking a lot of pictures in and around home. Not that that isn’t an admirable pursuit in its own way, but it means that I’m not taking pictures outside of the home, which is what I think I should be doing.
Anyway, this is one of them and I like it. I wanted to show the statue in a different and unique way. You can’t actually ever see it like this, with the really thin depth of field and in black and white (and formatted vertically!).
To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.
”aeroplane
There’s a place just 4km north of Tullamarine airport where you can park and watch various aircraft come in on their landing approaches. Well alright, not everyone’s cup of tea (although there is a coffee van there and I’m sure they’d do tea if you asked nicely) but I quite enjoyed the exercise of trying to get some pictures over the course of an hour or so.
One of my cameras had a meltdown while I was doing it and I’m not sure if this led to the dark patch on the right hand side. Turns out that part of the circuit board fried and disabled the camera’s ability to take shots on a manual exposure setting. I now have a replacement camera (that one was, in fairness, over thirty years old) so I guess I could go back and do it again - if the flight of fancy takes me.
Now that I look properly, these things are rather beautiful, aren’t they.
I wrote a story about my workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, with the wonderful photographer and teacher, Mary Ellen Mark.
Check it out! It’s a good blog.
“You need a Leica if you’re going to shoot real life and happiness. Kind-heartedness, life and people: it all boils down in the long run to love and affection. The Leica has just the right lens, shutter noise, and style to make it go perfectly with this kind of feeling. Like I said before, the Leica makes its presence in an incredibly reserved way. You get the impression that even the subject of your photo looks calmer and gentler.
It looks really refined and expensive as well. That’s another thing I like about it. With a cheap and shoddy camera all you can take are cheap and shoddy photographs. The photographs you take are a reflection of the camera you’re using!”
- Nobuyoshi Araki
via Self, Life, Death
From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things.
When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with.
At 75 I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects.
When I am 80 you will see real progress.
At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.
At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist.
At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.
To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self ‘The Old Man Mad About Drawing.
”