Meanwhile in Russia…
EXPLORING THE WORLD 

Actually I am more for dogs than for cats. But this six are too cute not to have some picts of them. And one can sit for hours just to watch how they are exploring the new world around them…

SOVIET STYLING

Pictures from a car exhibition showing 1950s and 1960s cars from the Soviet Union. Actually not so much difference from US car design (and fuel consumption) of that time. ;-)

GETTING INDEXED

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpredation equals photography. [Arnold Newman]

   Once there was a time when this sentence has its validity. Once there was a time when quality was more important than quantity,  the quality of a picture was more important than the quality of self-marketing. As a photographer you had a solid (year-long) education, in some countries (e.g. in Austria) a master craftsman degree was required for having a photographic business. The measure of your success was the quality of your work. And not the number of "clicks" your photographs are achieving, not your ranking on search engines.

Then came the Internet. And digital photography. And the phrase "If you buy a violin you own a violin. If you buy a camera you're a photographer" became a (sad) reality . Worldwide newspaper publishers are firing veteran photographers and are replaceing them with iPhones. In art not the quality of a photo is decisive, not the statement, the aesthetics, but the sales price only . Photo orders are only rarely awarded according to criteria such as quality, reliability, visual ideas and their implementation. Much more important today the "search algorithms", "keyword density", "meta tags", "canonical link elements". etc. In science there exist the rule "Publish or Perish". For a photographer applies accordingly: "SEO or perish". And so you spend hours and hours with "contextual advertising" or "behavioral targeting". And it stays on one end to perhaps 20% of its time to get creative. 

Brave new world ...

…DOWN TO GORKY PARK.

Pictures from a relaxed afternoon in Moscow's Gorky Park.

"Nobody can be uncheered with a baloon" (Winnie the Pooh)

Changing of the Season.

What's in the News?

The Selfie

SIMPLE THINGS I

Sometimes one can rejoice on very simple things…

VINTAGE

From my analog photography archive…

Ennstal Classic 1996 (Styria, Austria)
Camera: Nikon F4s
Film: Ilford XP2
Printed on Ilford Gallery Paper, selenium toned.

BACK TO THE ROOTS…
...or "The (re)discovery of slowness"

Battered, neglected for many years. But still working without objection: My RB67 equipment

Don't get me wrong. I'm really enjoying the work with digital cameras. A lot of possibilities which one could achieve with film only in a very complicated way - if at all. But sometimes I want to go back to my roots. 30 years ago, when i finished photo college in Vienna, digital photography was something we didn't even dream about. We had to do it the "hard" way. Large format camera, hidding behind the black cloth. Days after days in the darkroom, inhaling all this nice chemicals. Box after box of Ilford Gallery paper gone just to get one exhibition-worth picture… We had a lot of fun… And I would never have expected that i once would see working with my "old" cameras (still have my Nikon F4 and F5, my Sinar, my much-loved Mamyia RB67) as "experimental"…

A "hybrid", so to say. Mamyia RB67 meets Fujifil X-T1...

Yesterday i took my RB67 out of its case for the first time in years. Dusted it of, cleaned it. I did a lot of pictures, mainly landscapes, in the past. And I am pretty sure that I will use it quite often in the future. Depending how easy i can find film material and a labor…

Here some examples of what i did with the Mamiya, many years ago…

Film developing, fine art printing, toning, all done by myself.

From the Scotland portfolio

From the Lanzarote portfolio