Lens Artists, #367: Everyone Should See This

I’ve been a bit lax with the Lens-Artists Challenge just lately. A couple of weeks ago Egídio chose ‘Longing’ as the subject, but the only thing I mostly long for is our beach down in Meco, and I’d covered that the week before. Then it was Tina’s turn to host the Challenge. ‘Country Mouse, City Mouse’ was certainly an interesting subject, and I went to a few of my favourite spots to make some images. Sadly, though, my films have only just got back from the lab, so this entry is still very much a ‘work in progress’.

Last week, it was our guest host Joanne, from Joanne Mason Photography, to host the Challenge, and her fascinating theme for the week was, ‘Everyone Should See This‘. I had this entry all ready to go, but then I had a kidney stone (just a tiny one, mind), and my whole plan went out the window. Now, though, I think I’m back in better health, so it’s time to catch up with the Lens-Artists Challenge.

‘Often times we see something that inspires us’, says Joanne. ‘We think – “Oh! I wish others could see this!” … I think all of us have this experience now and again.’ Joanne’s Challenge was to ‘share some photographs of things/people/places that are inspiring and that you want to share. Tell us the circumstances of your photograph and why you want everyone to see it.’ My take on this was less, ‘everyone should see this’, and more, everyone should see the world like this. Joanne and others have presented some wonderful images of places they have been, but I thought it would be nice if we look at the world with a slightly different perspective.

Nowadays, digital cameras — or even smartphones — demand the highest resolution, be this 20, 30, or even 50MP. But what if all you had to play with was 0.014MP and four shades of grey? The Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy camera cartridge is a device that everyone should have. Each cartridge can hold 30 funtographs (as Gameboy photographs are known), and each funtograph is roughly 128×112 pixels. To download funtographs from the Gameboy, you’ll need a secondary device to save the images to a computer, and a photo editor to make them a decent size for sharing. But after all that effort, you’ll have an image that, yes, everyone should see.

This first image is a landscape. It’s a view of the trees in the woods that we walk through to get to the beach down in Meco.

The next two images are abstracts. The circular patterns are actually the ends of logs cut for firewood during the winter, and the square abstract is the pattern on a carpet. But you can see how even with the mundane, the Game boy gives the world a different perspective.

The funtograph below is one of my favourite, a Hiroshi Sugimoto-like minimal image of the beach, the sea, and the sky. There are people on the beach, but you wouldn’t know it.

Finally, these last couple of funtographs are of the paragliders on the Praia das Bicas. I presented a few more of these in a Lens-Artists Challenge about sports a few weeks ago, but when viewed through the Gameboy, you see the paragliders in a whole new light.

Occasionally, you might need to squint a little to identify the subject of a Gameboy funtograph (in this case a palm tree blowing in the wind), but there’s no mistaking that through the lens of the Gameboy you’ll look at the world in a whole new way (and don’t get me started on Gameboy trichromes and infrared).

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#2Bit #Challenge #Funtography #Gameboy #GameboyCamera #GameboyPocket #LensArtists #Nintendo #PixelArt #Retro #Summerinmeco

Lens-Artists Challenge #364: Quiet Moment

This week it’s Ritva’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Quiet Moment‘. ‘Where is your serene sanctuary?’ Asks, Ritva. ‘This week’s challenge is [a] “story-driven” adventure, encouraging you to explore and connect with your own experiences and emotions – “quiet moment”’.

Our holiday is over now, and we’re back to the ‘hustle and bustle’ of life up north. Of course,  living in the countryside, on the outskirts of a small town, is nothing like living in the city, but compared to our routine for the last five weeks life feels … faster. Down in Meco, apart from perhaps seven days that we lost due to the weather, heavy seas, or a bit of a chill that I picked up from getting wet on a windy day, our routine was to wake up late, have breakfast, prepare food for the day and then take the roughly 1km walk to the beach. After setting up our little ‘compound’ (as we called it), we would spend the next several hours on the beach.

At the end of the day, we would pack everything away, dispose of our rubbish in the bins provided, and make the trek back to our accommodation. It’s important to take all of your rubbish with you. We appreciate that the beach is for everyone and it deserves to be looked after. ‘Leave behind nothing but footprints’ is a good philosophy to follow, and even on the beach footprints are transitory. After a shower (and a beer), at 9pm we would head out for a late dinner, a digestivo in the local bar, and after a short walk to settle our stomachs, head to bed. Then we would wake up the next morning and repeat the experience. 

During our walk through the woods, often all we could hear was the occasional bird, the wind in the trees, and the waves pounding against the shore. On a quiet day, when the sea was still, it was difficult even to hear the waves. On the beach, I spent much of the time in the shade, with the sound of the waves lulling me into a peaceful sleep. At least once, we would stay for the sunset, when the sun dips below the horizon, leaving the sky a beautiful salmon colour before the night sets in. It’s all over now, we’re back up north, but we’re already looking forward to doing it all again next year.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Beach #Blue #Challenge #Cliffs #LensArtists #Praia #QuietMoments #Sky #Summerinmeco #Sunset #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #362: Sports, Sporting Events and Fun Games

This week, it’s Beth’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Sports, Sporting Events and Fun Games‘. On her blog, Wandering Dawgs, she says, ‘Your challenge is to show images from any sports or games you choose’. Well, if lying on the beach for several hours a day, turning over occasionally to get an even tan, was considered a sport, it would be a shoo-in. Sadly, it’s not, so I’ll have to think of some other pasttime.

Fortunately, on the next beach to ours, Praia das Bicas, some people do practise a really exciting sport, paragliding. The paragliders assemble on the cliffs behind Praia das Bicas and launch themselves into the air, using the wind currents to glide up and down the coast, either towards Cabo Espichel in the one direction or along our beach towards Praia do Meco in the other.

A few of the paragliders make a good living from giving rides to tourists, and it’s quite amusing watching the clients with their GoPros on a selfie stick shrieking with delight as they pass overhead. One of the pilots in particular is out quite a lot, and he certainly gives the client the ride of their lives, and sometimes the spectators on the ground a bit of a thrill, too.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

https://youtu.be/U99DroPBxEg?si=NiOgEQ5IMWpBEqbt

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Blue #Challenge #Cliffs #Games #LensArtists #Paraglider #Sky #SportingEvents #Sports #Summerinmeco #Sunset #beach #LensArtists #praia

Lens-Artists Challenge #359: Tools of Photo Composition (Lines, Colors, and Patterns)

It’s John’s turn to host the Challenge, and his theme is ‘Tools of Photo Composition: Lines, Colors, and Patterns‘. ‘This week’, writes John on his blog, Journeys with Johnbo, ‘the challenge is to … find examples of photographs that feature compositional elements such as lines, patterns, or colors’. We’re on holiday at the moment, and our options are limited to roughly green (on our walk through the woods), blue (of the sea or the sky), and well, the light brown sandy colour of the beach.

Back in Lens-Artists Challenge #323, Egídio asked us to ‘explore how we see silence in photography’, and this led me to an introduction of the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese photographer and architect who has spent decades travelling the world and recording seascapes. ‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security,’ says Sugimoto on his website, ‘as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.’ Sugimoto’s images often portray the division of sea and sky with a sharp horizon line.

Sugimoto used a large format camera to create his seascapes, sometimes with images up to three hours long. All I have is my smartphone. He also used to present them all in black and white with no signs of human habitation. I’ve actually tried a couple with a bit of sand included, a nod to the compositional rule of thirds. The last image, though this is in colour, actually looks like it was made in black and white. The wonders of light.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Challenge #Composition #Horizon #LensArtists #Lines #Sand #Sea #Sky #Summerinmeco #323 #beach #LensArtists #praia #Sugimoto

This week I’ve been unashamedly lazy with my entry to the Lens-Artists Challenge. Circumstances have dictated that I can’t really get out this week, a combination of working on the house and the dull weather, but that’s given me an opportunity to review a few of my favourite images.

This week, Egídio of Capturing My World Through Brazilian Eyes was tasked with setting the theme for the Challenge and he has chosen, ‘Silence‘. Egídio discussed the work of American photographer Robert Adams, who has spent decades documenting the natural and urban landscapes of the United States. In the book of his work, American Silence, Adams captures what he calls ‘the silence of light’ and Egídio identifies themes of Environmental Change, the Subject, a Form of Protest and the Silence of the Viewer in Adams’s timeless images of urban sprawl, strip malls, highways, and the natural American landscape.

This week, Egídio asks us to ‘explore how we see silence in photography’, and for me there’s no better example than the beach. I’ve mentioned it before, but ‘our’ beach in Portugal, near the village of Meco, is accessible only by clambering down a cliff or from the beaches either side. As a result it’s relatively peaceful compared to the nearby beaches of the Praia do Meco or the resort beaches of Cascais towards Lisbon. For the past few years I’ve been documenting the beach from the top of the cliff in a minimalist style, recording an empty or near empty beach, the sea and the sky, which for me is the ultimate expression of silence. 

This past year I posted one of my minimalist images on social media and someone commented that it was similar to the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese photographer and architect who has spent decades travelling the world and recording seascapes. ‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security,’ says Sugimoto  on his website, ‘as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.’ Sugimoto’s images evoke a sense of serenity and silence, and I hope that my images of the beach might produce similar emotions in the viewer.

That said, I also feel that a more ‘violent’ landscape can also evoke silence and occasionally, when the clouds roll in, the serenity of the Praia do Rio da Prata is transformed into a kaleidoscope of light and shadow. 

So now, whenever we go to the coast I try to take at least one minimalist landscape of the beach, sea and sky. The featured image on this post is actually from our recent holiday to the Maldives and this was one of the few days that we were greeted with a near cloudless sky. The image below was also from the Maldives, taken from the speedboat as we were transported to the airport for our flight back to Portugal. I could never get over the blue of the sea and although we were deafened by the motors of the boat there’s still a feeling of serenity about the view.

Just to finish the post I have included an urban expression of silence, from the Estação de Oriente in Lisbon, taken as we were waiting for the train to take us home. 

Next week’s Challenge should be interesting. Patti of pilotfishblog will be proposing an ‘In The Details’ challenge, photographing a subject from three different perspectives and varying distances. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/11/04/lens-artists-challenge-323-silence/

#Adams #Agua #Areia #Beach #Blue #Challenge #Ferias #LensArtists #Praia #Sand #Sea #Silence #Sky #Sugimoto #Summerinmeco #Sunset #LensArtists

I’ve only recently joined in with the Lens-Artists Challenge and I’m really enjoying taking part. I like to see the other submissions (and finding other new and interesting blogs to follow) and often scroll through the ‘Discover’ tab of the Jetpack app searching under the ‘Lens-Artists’ tag. The snag is that Jetpack doesn’t present a chronological list of posts from the most recent backwards but a jumbled list that I have to search through to find the most recent entries.

This is a bit of a mixed blessing, because although I’m quite happy to scroll through the entries I find myself becoming sidetracked by all of the wonderful photos that have been submitted in past Challenges. Sure enough, I came across an entry from a few weeks ago by Sofia of ‘photographias’ where she posted her Challenge for the week: Sense of Scale. Sofia presented some lovely examples but it got me thinking about a photograph of the beach that I had recently taken while we were on holiday.

Most days during our holiday we were able to get to the beach, and I always enjoy taking photographs of the shore and the sea. But one day, when it was actually too windy to go onto the beach — although fortunately some brave souls ventured down there or I wouldn’t have an image — I took a photograph from the cliff behind the beach which I think really shows a sense of scale, and I hope that you won’t mind my posting it so long after this Challenge subject has closed.

Normally, when we clamber down the cliff behind the beach it doesn’t seem that big. We know that there’s a 30m cliff behind the beach, and that it stretches from the Pria de Meco on the one side to Praia das Bicas on the other, but when we’re lying there getting a tan the world seems very … small. But from the cliff the true size of the Praia da Rio do Prata is revealed, and people on the sand with their umbrellas show just how big our beach actually is. One thing I should mention, these images are blurred deliberately. I’m a big fan of Intentional Camera Movement (ICM), where the camera is physically moved during exposure, and these were ‘bloopers’ from a series of ICM photographs taken during the holiday.

Should you want to know more about the Lens-Artists Challenge, each week a member of the Lens-Artists group is asked to host the Challenge and suggest a theme. The most recent was Egídio from ‘Capturing My World Through Brazilian Eyes’ and the theme was ‘Destination: Fun‘. Usually themes for the Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/09/21/lens-artists-challenge-revisited-312-sense-of-scale/

#Abstract #Agua #Areia #Beach #Blur #Challenge #Experimental #Ferias #ICM #Image #IntentionalCameraMovement #LensArtists #Motion #Praia #Sand #Sea #SenseOfScale #Shorelines #Summerinmeco #LensArtists

I’ve seen posts from the Lens-Artist Challenge before on WordPress but I’ve never taken part before, mainly because I never seem to have images that comply with the weekly theme of the Challenge. However, this time it is ‘Shorelines’ and since we’ve just spent five weeks on a beach it seemed only right that I should share some images of the Praia da Rio do Prata near Lisbon, Portugal. 

I have other images from our holiday, for the #ShittyCameraChallenge and explorations with Intentional Camera Movement and infrared, but these are Smartphone photographs that I didn’t really have a proper place for. So I hope that you like them. 

Each week a member of the Lens-Artist Challenge group is asked to host the Challenge and suggest a theme. This week it was Anne from ‘Slow Shutter Speed’ and the theme is Shorelines. Usually themes for the Challenge are posted  each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/09/05/lens-artists-challenge-314-shorelines/

#Agua #Areia #Beach #Blue #Challenge #Ferias #LensArtists #Praia #Sand #Sea #Shittycamerachallenge #Shoreline #Shorelines #Sky #Summerinmeco #Sunset #LensArtists

On the first day of our holiday we took ‘a walk around the block’ and I was able to revisit some old street art with the Vivitar ‘Vivicam’.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2023/07/27/the-shittycamerachallenge-and-the-glitchy-vivitar-vivicam-revisiting-vintage-street-art-and-the-works-of-dalaiama-27-july-2023/

#Camera #Digicam #Digitalcamera #Glitch #Glitchy #Photography #Shittycamerachallenge #Shittydigital #Summerinmeco #Trees #Vivitar

One afternoon, I took a walk around Meco with the glitchy Vivitar ‘Vivicam’. I headed toward the Praia das Bicas, but took a left turn to the EDP electricity sub-station. This one is quite special to me as it was painted several years ago by the street artist Dalaiama. A stencil-based street artist from Cascais, Dalaiama has been to the region a few times, and around Meco there are numerous examples of his work.

I’ve photographed these pieces several times before, but this is the first time I have used a camera apart from the smartphone and I wanted to see how it behaved. I didn’t deliberately glitch any of the images, though that would have been an interesting exercise, I suppose, just wanted to revisit and appreciate his work.

During my exploration, I was saddened to discover that one of Dalaiama’s stencils had been painted over by some other tagger. By this time, too, the glitchy Vivitar ‘Vivicam’ had started misbehaving and I had to photograph the destruction of that particular piece of artwork with the smartphone. 

I also came across a ‘new’ stencil by Dalaiama on a junction box near the campsite. I assume that this was painted during Dalaiama’s visit to Meco in 2009, but I had never seen it before, even though I have walked past this box many times over the years.

If you are interested in seeing more of his work, Dalaima has a blog on Blogger, although it hasn’t been updated since 2020. I’m not sure if he is still active, or if his site has moved. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to search for the artist online as most of the search suggestions are for the Dalai Lama. Still, if you are ever around Cascais or Lisbon, look out for his work.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2023/08/20/the-shittycamerachallenge-and-the-glitchy-vivitar-vivicam-revisiting-the-works-of-dalaiama-20-august-2023/

#Camera #Dalaiama #Digicam #Digitalcamera #Glitch #Glitchy #Graffiti #Photography #Shittycamerachallenge #Shittydigital #Streetart #Summerinmeco #Trees #Vivitar