Lensored in LA

Last weekend, we decided to take a cross country trip to Los Angeles from Raleigh to hang out with old friends, including those that contribute this blog. It involved two red-eye flights (including one exceptionally long flight delay), reaching LA at 3:30 am, lack of sleep, mini-vuvuzela inspired midnight birthday celebrations, vegan meals (when in LA.....) and generally randomness around the city. You get the overall picture.

I started going through some of the photos I took there when I got back. I had decided not to take my usual SLR along this time .That lens, while I love it, is simply too heavy and I wasn't too keen on lugging it around. So I had just my iPhone (broken screen and all), with its not-so-great camera to take any photos. Now I admit I'm not really fond of phone cameras, and am a bit snooty when it comes to using them. However, I recently found this interesting app called Hipstamatic, which recreates old film camera prints. The app is intended to be used mainly for fun, but then again, so was the Brushes app, and you only need to look at the New Yorker magazine cover from a new months back to see the extent that people take an app. Ultimately, photography (like art) is about composition. And if an app like Hipstamatic can add a certain character to that composition, then all the better. And yes, it is definitely fun to use. Enjoy a small selection of these photos.

The Lone Surfer

A sister-post of sorts to Pacific Palette

Pacific Palette

I live close to the Pacific Ocean. I've frequently walked on the shore and told myself that I need to come back with the camera. Last weekend, I finally remembered to carry it with me during a late evening walk on the beach and clifftops.

There is much I could say about the pictures below. I could talk about timing (though I did not time anything), weather conditions (though I did not check the forecast) and location (though I happened to be here only because it is 5 minutes from home and I was too lazy to go farther). I could discuss camera settings (though I didn't really change any at all), concept (though anything I say would be retrofitted) or composition (if 'stand, look, click, repeat' equates composition). I could talk about the parallels between this post and Horizons, which are both legitimate and uncanny, but ultimately coincidental...

Truth is, sometimes all you need is a little imagination, and a camera in the right place at the right time - the sun, sky and ocean take care of the rest!

Pink In Blur.......

I have been meaning to create this post for a while now and continually I've found a dearth of verbal constructs to define the abstraction of these images. Then, this morning I came across this prodigious quote which said it all:

“ Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers shackles limiting our visions." – Salvador Dali

To me this best defines the abstract and the intangible quality of these images leaving much to one’s imagination.

Ten Montages

These montages, produced since 2003, complimented vacation-walks, mountain-hikes, architectural field trips and common urban strolls using fixed-zoom lenses. Almost incidental in nature, since a camera was always accessible during these outings – they were never preconceived as single snapshots or montages.

Montages or joiners¹ are stronger representations of their subjects as they prevent image-distortion – a commonality produced by wide-angle lenses, and depict a realistic sense of the space and time. The flâneur-experience² represented in the montages includes body parts of the photographer - a conscious addition to the panoramic subject.

¹Hockney, David. (2009) Hockney on Art: Conversations with Paul Joyce. London: Little, Brown Book Group

²Walter Benjamin. (2002) The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press

© 2010 by Gautam Desai. All rights reserved

New York by Air

Overexposed, but by no means overrated. That's the Manhattan skyline for you. The airborne pictures were taken two years ago and despite the city's ever-changing urban morphology, the timeless classics that are the ESB, Chrysler and the Brooklyn/Manhattan Bridges, stand out strong much like the prominent features of a near-perfect face. A face that ages with grace.

Evocative...but why?

This piece builds on the theme of early morning light raised in the posts 'Horizons...' and 'Good Morning, Durham'.

While driving a lonely but gorgeous byway in Utah last week, I found myself contemplating why the sight of early morning (or even late evening) light holds so much more sway than bright afternoon light. Photographers talk about the usual soft light-better colors-gentler illumination-longer shadows stuff, but that doesn't explain why majority of the hordes at 'sunset point' or 'sunrise point' at natural attractions everywhere brave factors as diverse as traffic, long hikes, biting cold or searing heat, and unspeakable crowds to catch sunrise or sunset, without so much as a disposable camera on their persons.

The sight of the rising and setting sun, and its light reflected on the environs is deeply evocative. This goes beyond just beauty - it is a more visceral appeal, and far more universal than other forms of beauty - human, artistic or any other type. As a student of neuroscience, the universality of this reaction leads me to believe that there is a neurobiological basis to this - a visual trigger of a hippocampal memory...or amygdaloid reflex...with Darwinian roots...perhaps...

Ultimately, anything related to photography comes down to a brain response - now all we need to do is pinpoint how!

The pictures below were taken over the past year, and are intended as a template for pondering over this idea.