I love photography. For me, it’s like painting, but better. And more accurate. And unlike painting, I can actually participate. I am not a big success or great master by any means. But I enjoy taking pictures. I also enjoy looking at other people work and sometimes sharing it. When I do, this is the category that I use.
My office window is a source for many of my pictures. Barrels is yet another one. ETKO (?) winery is a nextdoor building to our offices. Among many other things, these guys have an extended collection of barrels stored on the roof of one of their building. I was noticing the pattern for a long time, but only today it occured to me to make a picture.
Album location: /photos/2004/2004-12-04_POTD
I just watched “Beyond Borders” on DVD. This is an excellent drama about two people being in love and not being able to be together. It differs somewhat from many movies that I have seen recently.
The story is excellent. It is very realistic while providing this movie touch to it. There is plenty of excellent acting in the film. Both Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen delivered excellent performance. Accompaning soundtrack was very natural and nicely integrated making the movie a lot more atmospheric and emotional.
Camera work and photography were very good. The story takes place in different parts of the world from Africa to Chechnya and the difference is shown very nicely in the film. Attention to details was also beyond average with great costume design, supporting characters and set decorations.
I probably sound like this film was perfect. Well, it wasn’t but it was very very good. It was naive and slow at places, but these moments don’t spoil the whole impression from the movie.
I’ll give it 8 out of 10. Very very good.
P.S.: In this film Angelina Jolie plays an UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) ambassador. It turns out that she is a Good Will UNHCR Ambassador in real life and that she travelled to 15 countries where she helped refugees. Impressive!
P.P.S.: There is a moment in the film when Angelina Jolie sees a starving kid who is about to die and there is this huge bird sitting beside him waiting for him to die. She than stops the truck, picks him up and saves him. It turns out that this piece is based on a real story. Kevin Carter once made a photograph of a kid and bird like the ones in the movie. He won Pulitzer prize for it. But he, unlike Angelina in the movie, didn’t pick up and save the kid (it was dangerous because of many deseases over there). But he could never forgive himself for it and few years later he committed suicide (source is here, scroll down to the part where it says “Then there is the sad story…”. I picked this up at IMDB forums.).
I was watching the sky for the last few days. I find it interesting that sky in Cyprus is mostly boring. In summery it is plain blue, and in winter it is plain gray. Spectacular cloud formations are very rare and usually come either with night time or heavy raining which kind of excludes the photography for me.
I have noticed though that there is some other aspect to watch for – shades. When clouds are few and the sun is shining, clouds drop shadows on to the ground. If shooting from a high spot with nice panorama, there are some opportunities in there.
Just to remind myself about this later on, I’ve uploaded this photograph.
Album location: /photos/2004/2004-12-01_POTD
As I have promised before, our new Christmas tree was photographed, postprocessed and published. The lights are not all that good yet, so you’ll have to excuse a lot of close-up flash and Gimping I had to do.
I’ve just noticed that it was a whole week without any submission to ‘Picture of the day’ project. Talk about rainy cold weather and lack of inspiration, eh.
Album location: /photos/2004/2004-11-27_POTD
59th College Photographer of the Year competition annouced its winners. Make sure to check the winning pictures.