Hermit Hideaways

I was out the other day in and around Insadong and Samcheong-dong working on a piece for KTO when I saw this adorable Korean girl making faces at a wooden mobile. Round and round it went and she was just mesmerized by it.

Seoul Selection selected my snap of the changing-of-the-guards ceremony in front of Gyeongbok Palace as the cover shot this month. Needless to say, I am pretty happy about that. I really liked the way that pic turned out. You can view the larger version here. I’ve tweaked it a little. The original is a little more vibrant. I tend to de-saturate my pictures - a technique I may have overused somewhat lately.

You can download the May issue in PDF format. The photo below is from the magazine’s gallery section. I took that at Changduk Palace in a secret garden.

Quite possibly the hardest element of photography to master in my books. But once you get your fist around it, it will open doors like you wouldn’t believe. There’s a great link I read this morning that gives a great rundown on setting the camera up for the perfect shot. Honestly, I rarely use a polarizer anymore. I found that the sky was almost black in a few of my shots. I nearly always shoot in aperture mode and often fiddle with the f/stop settings to get the skies I want.

Last Friday’s Image of Korea featured the region of Yeongdong - made famous for producing the wine that was served at Pyongyang’s inter-Korean summit in 2007. The area hosts a grape festival in August where visitors can come and pick grapes and participate in the winemaking process. Cool stuff indeed. I know where I’m going to be in August.

My brother in Toronto sent a couple pics he snapped with his Canon 20D the other day. The pooch in question is Bala. 

I started the ball rolling some time ago about this heated subject, and I must say because of the nature of discussion, one would struggle coming to grips at finding any clear resolve. Suffice it to say, it should never be argued that just because a ‘camera’ doesn’t pose as a paintbrush, nor any other musical instrument let’s say, that it can’t act as a channel for one’s creative thoughts. In fact, and I quote Ken Rockwell on this, ‘Attempts to put numerical scales and grades on art or photos fail and wind up encouraging people to make crap.’ Taking pictures is, in fact, a pretty limitless medium and one through which someone can express their imagination even if it doesn’t completely distort or ‘change’ what’s before their very own eyes, like Dali might do to a clock… or Cezanne to a French landscape. Taking pictures should come from what’s inside your heart, and that CAN be accomplished through a lens. It’s how I shoot. It’s also what differentiates the end results from the millions of people who can take a common scene and put their own unique spin on it. The camera I lug around is, in fact, my brush and the canvas upon which the picture bleeds in to shape is my presentation of my ‘own’ reality - what I see before me.

‘Art is the expression on the imagination, not the duplication of reality’. Now, even though is slightly off course, I believe it to be the best description of what art is - even though it seems to be evolving continuously as years go by. Art is our own expression of our ‘reality’, as we interpret the world and its complexities. There is a guiding ‘truth’ that we all know exists but that we haven’t fully discovered yet, but our own ‘realities’ are what drive us to ‘it’.

Even though a camera may not resemble an ‘artistic’ device, it is surely one where someone’s imagination and ingenuity can be used to express their own imagination. Sure, Dali can distort an object and call it his own, but is it not fair to say that waiting for the better shot, or changing the angle of a scene can alter its natural appearance, whereby the photographer has essentially created a different picture altogether of what they see before them? I believe so.

I wrote several articles recently for a KTO shopping series. The first was for Myeongdong, the second for Itaewon, the third for Namdaemun, and the fourth for Apgujeong. Frankly, I think the one I did last year for Seoul Selection is far better layout-wise than the most recent Apgujeong piece. Anyhow, feel free to browse through them. 

A friend of mine manages a great site that enables users to market and sell their work by either setting their own price or having it measured by an exclusive algorithm that determines and maximizes content revenue according to the demands of the marketplace. Essentially, members can buy, sell and request video footage, short films, animations, motion graphics, backgrounds and photos through the protected online store. It’s the first of it kind and one to keep an eye out for. To dig a little deeper, check out the official site and sign up for free. Those with more questions, you’ll find more answers at the FAQ page here.

John’s based in New York and from what I can tell has a real strong interest in Asia. He’s very supportive and very keen on working with photographers and/or videographers that are already based here.

Two great applications I use are Aperture 2.0 and Adobe Lightroom. I read recently that Adobe is releasing an upgraded version of Lightroom. It’s only a beta version but it still looks pretty sweet. There’s a nice little write-up here together with the download.  Be advised that it’s meant to run alongside Lightroom 1.3 and won’t update existing 1.3.1 libraries. Give it a swing. Lightroom rocks. I think the colour renditions are far more accurate that Photoshop. I rarely even use Photoshop anymore.

I’ll post the link to the article when it goes up, but for now I’ll squeeze in one more favorite from last week. Although I’ve been to just about every palace throughout Seoul a dozen times, I still managed to snag a different angle this time around. This was taken at Deoksugung Palace. You can view the best of the rest here.