Learning to see the #beauty, #play and #vitality in #quarantinelife, mostly by learning to make photos and learning to write about them.
Most of the time, I shoot in aperture priority, and most of the time, I leave the aperture at maximum (f2 for most of my Fujifilm lenses). Most of the time, it results in the effect I am looking for, with a shallow depth of field, a sharp in-focus subject and soft out-of-focus foreground and […]
Today, I baked a loaf of bread that is difficult to categorize. I used two-day old, high-hydration, long-fermented sourdough pizza dough, stuffed it with olives and doused it in olive oil like a focaccia, then baked it in a closed dutch oven like sourdough bread. The result: a dense loaf with a crispy fried crust […]
I have been taking my Fujifilm X-T4 with me on my terrace walks everyday, sometimes twice a day. I usually go a little after lunch, when the sun is up high in the sky, the light is good, and the terrace is empty. The building is surrounded by a canopy of trees on two sides […]
Here’s another perspective of yesterday’s maximalist balcony garden, this time with the focus on the jute basket. I shot the photograph in my Fuji X-T4’s native vertical 2:3 aspect ratio. I was attracted to the circular shape, the soft yellow-orange color and the geometrical texture of the jute basket in the bottom left corner, and […]
I recently wrote that photography is essentially a reductive medium: We start with the whole wide world, then choose to frame a small sliver of it in our viewfinder. Sometimes, we focus on a part of the frame with a shallow depth of field and blur the foreground and background into bokeh. Sometimes, we saturate […]
When I started going for walks on my terrace this week, I discovered that it has a lovely view of the sea to the West, filled with low red and white buildings and lush green and yellow trees, if I ignored the tall buildings to the sides, and the construction equipment at the edge of […]
Yesterday, I wrote about converting a color photograph to black and white to make the subject stand out. Color attracts our attention, and bright saturated colors in the foreground or background can attract our attention away from the subject. Converting the photograph to black and white can being the focus back to the subject. In […]
I went up to my roof yesterday for a late afternoon walk, my first time in a year and a half of living in my building. At first, I had the roof to myself, and it was lovely, with a view of the setting sun against the sea on one side and a lush green […]
After 100+ days in quarantine, I am asking myself how the pandemic will change our relationship with our homes. Before Coronavirus: the City as Home Before coronavirus, we thought of our cities as extensions of our homes. We walked amongst nature in its leafy lanes, parks and promenades. We entertained ourselves in its cinema halls, […]