This is a shot by a photographer that I've been keeping an eye on for a while. His name is Tristan Savatier and he goes by "loupiote (Old Skool)" on Flickr.
It was initially his shots of Burning Man that first caught my attention, but his portfolio is much broader than that. He has an amazingly good eye, and also his knack for catching his subjects in really compelling poses is quite enviable.
To top it all off, he seems to have some connection to (or friends in) the Burning Man organization. He always seems to have a few photos that would be hard to get without special permission to be somewhere. Case in point, this shot of this years temple burn was clearly taken from one of the cherry-picker cranes that were lined up around the crowd. Lucky bastard. ;-)
Friday, September 14, 2007
Thursday, September 13, 2007
A "Photography Blog" perhaps?
Perhaps this blog is destined to become a blog about my photography and about the art in general. Lately that has become one of my more passionate and absorbing interests.
I've always liked taking photographs, since I was quite little. I seem to remember my Dad always having a few cameras. He had the ever-magical Polaroid, which I think was originally a justified purchase for his dental office. Pictures that would slowly appear before your eyes... it was fairly commonplace around our home, but it never lost it's almost mystical nature. There was a part of me that wanted to know how it worked, yet I don't ever remember asking. It seemed appealing that there was a little bit of enduring mystery to it - and also to why you had to flap it back and forth like it was drying while you waited for the picture to expose. It was just part of the ritual.
And then he had one of the Kodak Pocket Instamatic cameras using the little 110 film cartridges. When I was small, he used to let me help with the picture-taking process, and handle the eternally statisfying job of "pressing the button" (even more fun on the Polaroid too, for obvious reasons). In later years, I recall the Instamatic being tossed aside in it's advancing age in favour of forays into larger cameras with better lenses. I don't recall my Dad ever taking the plunge and getting a full SLR with swappable lenses, but in the 80's sometime he did move up to a camera with a big lens, autofocus and some digital controls.
However for a time, that Instamatic - still functional in spite of its age - became the "kids camera". Between the easy cartridge-loading film, and the small size being fairly forgiving to small hands, it worked well for me as a kiddo. I do remember taking some photos of my own while quite young. But my Dad being relatively frugal though, never seemed to encourage the idea of shooting (and then paying for subsequent development of...) tons of film. So it remained a fairly occasional thing to do.
Later, once I matured to the point of budgeting my own spending money, and even eventually working part-time to earn my own money, that frugal attitude towards photos always kept me from thinking of photos as something I would take merely for the sake of capturing a great image alone. It always seemed that documenting our lives, our friends, and our fun was worth paying for... a noble and worthy expense. But I wouldn't ever just shoot a pinecone because it had nice ridges.
Then, in 1995, I was working in sales at Doppler Computer Superstore in Vancouver, and we got into stock the first digital camera that I'd ever seen. It was one of early the Casio QV models, that took an abysmal 320x240 pixel picture... but between the tiny LCD screen on the back (so that you could immediately see your photos), and the pivoting lens (so that you could easily shoot a self-portrait), I was sucked in. I had used scanners before that and was aware of the quality that one could get scanning a JPG of a printed photograph, and prior to this I had been dimly aware that digital cameras were "coming"... but we got this camera in stock and the store had a demo model. As a salesperson, it was my responsibility to familiarize myself with the product so I could justify playing with it to my heart's content.
The geek in me was instantly aware of the power of this tool. Even though this early Casio had fixed memory and took ages to dump it's photos to a computer, the concept of shooting limitlessly without the cost of film or developing was very appealing. The store had also just gotten in C-R burner drives and even though the blank media was clocking in at $30 a disc, I could see where this was going. There would come a time when you could shoot forever with no further cost. One day, I thought, I could really get into photography... but not yet.
Ironically, it would be years before I would own my own digital camera though. Sometime in 1999, after having worked for Relic for at least a year, the company decided to bit the bullet and buy a digital camera. We got a, very current at the time, 1.3 megapixel Olympus point and shoot. I was in the position where I could shoot quite a bit with work's camera and therefore didn't yet need to buy my own digital... so I still waited.
Between the time I had graduated high school in 1993, all the way to working for Relic in the late nineties and early 2000's, I had enough disposable income that I could budget shooting on and developing some film. Never a lot, but enough to adequately document my life as it proceeded. Mostly 35mm pocket cameras, and then a hand-me-down APS pocket camera that Rachel gave me. Even up to my wedding to Claire in 2002... at which point I finally had a Canon digital video camera (also courtesy of my generous sister), I still hadn't bought a digital camera of my own for stills.
Then finally in the summer of 2002, Claire and I were invited to go to the Vancouver International Folk Festival as guests of our now-departed friend T. Paul Ste. Marie, who was bringing his spoken word night - Thundering Word Heard - to the folk fest stages for the first time, in the form of himself and a number of Vancouver's spoken word artists. My friend Erin, offered to lend me his Canon Digital S400, a beautiful 4 megapixel pocket camera that took simply spectacular shots.
With spare memory cards in tow, I took hundreds of shots over the couple of days, and after that was kicking myself for never biting the bullet and ponying up for a good camera... and so I bought the same one for myself.
Since then I've shot a *lot*. Hundreds, even thousands of shots a month.
Owning my own digital camera was the permission that I needed for myself to shoot anything and everything. I tried to get fairly good at it - to develop my "eye"... but shooting with a cheap little pocket camera is not the way to go for high-quality. I still knew that that was another echelon further up in investment. But at least I never needed to miss out on shooting something that I wanted to shoot now.
The photograph linked above was taken with that same Canon S400 (the first digital camera that I purchased) in 2004, while on our first trip to the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A trip that would ultimately claim the life of that camera... but that's a story for another post.
I've always liked taking photographs, since I was quite little. I seem to remember my Dad always having a few cameras. He had the ever-magical Polaroid, which I think was originally a justified purchase for his dental office. Pictures that would slowly appear before your eyes... it was fairly commonplace around our home, but it never lost it's almost mystical nature. There was a part of me that wanted to know how it worked, yet I don't ever remember asking. It seemed appealing that there was a little bit of enduring mystery to it - and also to why you had to flap it back and forth like it was drying while you waited for the picture to expose. It was just part of the ritual.
And then he had one of the Kodak Pocket Instamatic cameras using the little 110 film cartridges. When I was small, he used to let me help with the picture-taking process, and handle the eternally statisfying job of "pressing the button" (even more fun on the Polaroid too, for obvious reasons). In later years, I recall the Instamatic being tossed aside in it's advancing age in favour of forays into larger cameras with better lenses. I don't recall my Dad ever taking the plunge and getting a full SLR with swappable lenses, but in the 80's sometime he did move up to a camera with a big lens, autofocus and some digital controls.
However for a time, that Instamatic - still functional in spite of its age - became the "kids camera". Between the easy cartridge-loading film, and the small size being fairly forgiving to small hands, it worked well for me as a kiddo. I do remember taking some photos of my own while quite young. But my Dad being relatively frugal though, never seemed to encourage the idea of shooting (and then paying for subsequent development of...) tons of film. So it remained a fairly occasional thing to do.
Later, once I matured to the point of budgeting my own spending money, and even eventually working part-time to earn my own money, that frugal attitude towards photos always kept me from thinking of photos as something I would take merely for the sake of capturing a great image alone. It always seemed that documenting our lives, our friends, and our fun was worth paying for... a noble and worthy expense. But I wouldn't ever just shoot a pinecone because it had nice ridges.
Then, in 1995, I was working in sales at Doppler Computer Superstore in Vancouver, and we got into stock the first digital camera that I'd ever seen. It was one of early the Casio QV models, that took an abysmal 320x240 pixel picture... but between the tiny LCD screen on the back (so that you could immediately see your photos), and the pivoting lens (so that you could easily shoot a self-portrait), I was sucked in. I had used scanners before that and was aware of the quality that one could get scanning a JPG of a printed photograph, and prior to this I had been dimly aware that digital cameras were "coming"... but we got this camera in stock and the store had a demo model. As a salesperson, it was my responsibility to familiarize myself with the product so I could justify playing with it to my heart's content.
The geek in me was instantly aware of the power of this tool. Even though this early Casio had fixed memory and took ages to dump it's photos to a computer, the concept of shooting limitlessly without the cost of film or developing was very appealing. The store had also just gotten in C-R burner drives and even though the blank media was clocking in at $30 a disc, I could see where this was going. There would come a time when you could shoot forever with no further cost. One day, I thought, I could really get into photography... but not yet.
Ironically, it would be years before I would own my own digital camera though. Sometime in 1999, after having worked for Relic for at least a year, the company decided to bit the bullet and buy a digital camera. We got a, very current at the time, 1.3 megapixel Olympus point and shoot. I was in the position where I could shoot quite a bit with work's camera and therefore didn't yet need to buy my own digital... so I still waited.
Between the time I had graduated high school in 1993, all the way to working for Relic in the late nineties and early 2000's, I had enough disposable income that I could budget shooting on and developing some film. Never a lot, but enough to adequately document my life as it proceeded. Mostly 35mm pocket cameras, and then a hand-me-down APS pocket camera that Rachel gave me. Even up to my wedding to Claire in 2002... at which point I finally had a Canon digital video camera (also courtesy of my generous sister), I still hadn't bought a digital camera of my own for stills.
Then finally in the summer of 2002, Claire and I were invited to go to the Vancouver International Folk Festival as guests of our now-departed friend T. Paul Ste. Marie, who was bringing his spoken word night - Thundering Word Heard - to the folk fest stages for the first time, in the form of himself and a number of Vancouver's spoken word artists. My friend Erin, offered to lend me his Canon Digital S400, a beautiful 4 megapixel pocket camera that took simply spectacular shots.
With spare memory cards in tow, I took hundreds of shots over the couple of days, and after that was kicking myself for never biting the bullet and ponying up for a good camera... and so I bought the same one for myself.
Since then I've shot a *lot*. Hundreds, even thousands of shots a month.
Owning my own digital camera was the permission that I needed for myself to shoot anything and everything. I tried to get fairly good at it - to develop my "eye"... but shooting with a cheap little pocket camera is not the way to go for high-quality. I still knew that that was another echelon further up in investment. But at least I never needed to miss out on shooting something that I wanted to shoot now.
The photograph linked above was taken with that same Canon S400 (the first digital camera that I purchased) in 2004, while on our first trip to the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A trip that would ultimately claim the life of that camera... but that's a story for another post.
A first post?
I dunno about this whole blogging thing. I've long doubted that anyone would have any real interest in anything I'd have to say, but I may try to stick with it. I'm mostly here to investigate it for my wife Claire who wants to get underway with her personal blog.
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