Photography: Brussels, Belgium, in October.
I live in Lille, North of France. As you can see on the map, Belgium is a small neighbour, a friendly one. During the week-ends, many people from France go visite Belgium… and vice versa!
Here are, absolutely untouched, pictures of parks and streets, evenings and railroads.
Have a great day!
Photography: “La Dordogne”, a French river. How to photograph a river? She’s like the lady you’re in love with: she’s complex, multiple, given, elusive, clear, dark, changing and marvellous. What do I choose? The light? Water? Trees? Rocks? Here are 14 pictures of La Dordogne, near the little town of Carsac.
Photography: An old cemetery in Sarlat-La-Canéda, France. Statues, old stones and flowers.
Sarlat-La-Canéda is a medieval town in France, near Bordeaux. Yes, it’s a good place to drink wine and eat meals made of ducks and geese (confits and all).
Today I choose to show you the roofs. I took many pictures thus you’ll see streets, forests, rivers and… the cemetery.
I added a little Poulenc because it’s my little obsession of the time.
Have a good day!
Photography : Saint-Palais sur Mer, France, summer 2018
Photography : Montmartre, Paris, Light & Shadow
Photography : Orsay Museum’s Clock
Photography : Roofs of Mont Cassel, in the North of France “Built on a prominent hill overlooking French Flanders”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassel,_Nord
Countryside panoramic photos taken from a car in the North of France, may 2019
Photography : Walls & Windows in Lille, France, Easter 2019
I like photography. I have fun with my cam, I buy books, I read a little about it. I’m just an amateur! “What does the photographer want?” is an interesting question :
“Untriggered by assessments” : What does the photographer want?
To play with his tool (the cam itself)? With Photoshop? To surprise us? To meet people? To be a witness? To show something? To capture-a-moment!
Etc…
I like to work on composition, the structure of image. I love underexposed photos. I like to show little things (toys, insects). I like strangeization.
Here we are : for me, as we all live in a world full of photos – our eyes (and attention) pass from a picture to another, continuously – thus : a picture should stop the viewer’s eyes.
There are many ways to do that. One low trick is to take anything reflected in a puddle then to put the picture upside down, hahaha. Eyes are trapped, then your brain watches around ,then fixes it. But, well, photo stopped the viewer, okay.
Here’s how I play.
This was an easy effect here : the blue color was enough to make you “feel” a pool, therefore I drowned it into blur to play with the spears. Atmo : there’s no sun, the water’s cold, there’s nobody and parasols are closed.
There’s this danger (always, with clouds) : you can quickly get a painting. Indeed, I often send clouds to friends. Like : “Oh, look!“. Nothing to be proud of, but sometimes mother nature just helps. The sky here was perfect, summereveninging like silly. Like calling for the picture. Héhooo! I just used the depth of field to make a dreamy sky…
My daughter was so proud of her stick. I don’t know what she had in mind at this moment, but I sepiaed it. Probably a queen, or feeling a top of the mountain summer minute. The clouds (again!) were perfect, don’t you think?
First, I think it was a “lines game”, underexposing the whole thing to get real blacks. It became a feeling of boredom you always get in new places like this neighborhood. Everything is clean and new, giving you a huge appetite for cracks in the concrete (I found some), a lynchian scream muffled in a room – and you dream to get elsewhere to find an old church and cobbled streets…
Placing the cam so low that thistles look like trees. Purpling flowers against a dangerous sky made me feel the heavy stormy summer. Bees were the cherry of the cake. Stop and wait for thunder…
Some photography rules are funny to disobey off : “never place something in the middle”, rule of third, blah blah bleh. It’s why I put the dragonfly there, so there! I just had to get the tree on the right, the orange roof (important), the innocent sky…
Running errands, I found a structure : dead flowers, white/grey lines, a star above. Typical of what I love. When you see it you’re all…
“Graffitis – oh a fish, it’s… – wait, who are the 3 guys? – ah okay”
Cuteness is inevitable, sometimes. I had to lie on the ground to do this, but awweeeee, right? Of course I thought “family” and “winter”. And the colors…
Here, in Dieppe, Normandy, it’s a game of lines, of textures (water, concrete), of light and shadow, and it contains the sound, too, don’t you think? Listen…
Capturing a moment, of course, is easier with digital cams. Just get ready. My two daughters here are in like pajamas. The light seems to show it’s summer evening, thus the house (behind me) was not far. Now I hope you imagined the low orange light in the kitchen, waiting for family time to come soon. Kids and the sea…
A “road” in Cabourg. It was lonely grey, I was listening to Hindemith (Mathis), and the house seems closed. It’s like a drawing. And here, above all, don’t touch the cursors to make the picture sharp! It’d ruin the mood, oui?
Cuteness again? I was reading in the morning sun when I noticed this demoiselle araignée dancing around. Hello, miss! I just needed the size of the page number to show it. And to keep her clearly defined…
I link this with my previous article : The passage from prose to verse; from speech to song; from walking to dancing.
Isn’t photography available to the same structure? The passage from “testimony and catching” to…
To what? Stop the usually bored viewer to make him feel something?
I think that photography is to walk what interesting photography is to dance (or poetry/speech).
Last week I participated to a challenge with a single theme : Yellow. As I guessed, everybody posted the yellowest picture they had. To “stop” viewers, I posted the most turned out yellow I found. In the middle of killing pictures of YELLOW flowers, I found this cold uninteresting wire in a winter garden, voilà. I did not win, fellows, but you could have guessed it…
Have a nice day!
ONE
I just watched Seven Samurai (Japan, black & white, 1954), then The Magnificent Seven (1960).
It’s a big pleasure watching both, but each time it’s very different. Kurosawa’s movie looks very odd, because of the culture, the language and the well known Japanese actors’ intensity. The US one is much more easy and comfortable, with stars (Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner…).
But there’s a “side-pleasure” : you compare. The stories the paces, the ends, the bad guys, the fights…
TWO
Traveling! Tourists have many ways of being tourists : in a group, alone, moving around and visiting, or staying in one city (choose Paris, OK?) and walk “going whichever way the wind blows” (we say “le nez au vent” – nose in the wind).
It’s beautiful or not, deceiving or marvelous, you take pictures or you chat with your spouse. But you have to admit :
The pleasure, again, is in the comparisons game.
THREE
There’s a game I love : learning another language. It’s absolutely full of delights. Culturally. Translating. Discovering idioms. Trying to find out where translated words don’t really fit, match the other language. Finding similar words… or traitors (a library (bibliothèque) is NOT a librairie (bookstore) in France…).
It is, constantly, a game of comparisons.
FOUR
I strongly think that a big part of our inner life is linked to the world with the concept of Analogy. We endlessly get informations with our senses (about places, culture, and people, everything we meet) and then we braincompute them with what-we-already-know with analogy.
Then, we compare. Then, we decide.
This decision can be : run away, explore, smile, talk, anything.
OUTRO
Where else does it happen to you? Where could you trigger a “game of comparisons”? How is it an enrichment? Where is the effort? What about memories? Analogy with them?
Thanks for reading!
Le Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, is housed in a former Beaux-Art station.
I went there last week; I only took a few pictures (here’s Monet) and I’ll post some of them later. But I noticed a few paintings. Who knows why a painting touches you?
We walked in Paris. I played with light with my camera. Orsay, church, roofs, rain…
Have a nice day!
Walking in Paris with my Canon cam, I saw shadows and lights…
Walking in Paris in March : la Seine, l’opéra Garnier, le Grand Palais, la Place des Vosges…
Paris Landscapes. Beaubourg. Magenta. La Seine…
a french toolbox 