+ Blog.

More photos by Elkie can be found here.

Moth trails; who would have known you could make long exposures of them. These guys obviously did. It’s quite refreshing to see some original ideas coming out of the seemingly very tired old technique of waving lights in front of your camera. I don’t mean to sound like a pompous twat, but it all becomes a bit cliché really. This however, I like. More here.

You’ll also find several videos in that set, including a link to this one:

Google have got millions of photos from Life magazine’s archive hosted over here. They range from the 1750’s to the present day.

New Project. This is a work in progress of a response to this term’s brief surrounding Digital Culture and it’s many connotations. Specifically, I am exploring environments in which the virtual overlaps with the physical to create new immersive realities. So far my approach has been that of design and functionality, looking at how a space has been constructed to serve a function. I managed to gain access to certain venues quicker than I had imaged, and the above photo is an experimental example of one of them. I like the potential for it to work as a series, but it’s still early days and I might, depending on where this takes me, try and push for an installation of sorts.

More to come.

I’ve been in an academic, photographic institution for the past two and a half years, and the names of most of those I first learned about and was inspired by are hardly ever mentioned anymore. As the course progresses, our focus shifts ever more towards the more “contemporary/conceptual” side of the medium, leaving many of the legendary image makers in its trail. The sole purpose of this blog is really for me to share things that interest me with anybody – strangers or people I know – who stumble across it. A lot of the work of the photographers that I too often simply glance at nowadays, as they have grown to be so familiar, may not be so recognisable for others. As a result, I’ve decided that I shall now attempt to make more references to their work on here in the hopes that those who have not yet met them may finally become acquainted.

The above image is by Diane Arbus, a legendary portrait photographer who pointed her lens at the weird, wonderful and outright strange elements of society.

Here is a great selection of her work.

Just came across Jill Freedman. Never heard of her before, but I’m really impressed with some of her stuff. The New York Times has compared her work to the likes of Weegee and Diane Arbus, and she certainly shares the same sense of proximity found in a lot of their images. It was actually the above photo alone that made me decide she was at least worth a mention. There’s a boat load of Freedman’s work over at HigherPictures, which is where I initially came across her.

Not only is that dog mounting the other, but that guy’s also butt naked.

One wonders what the context of the walk was.

There’s actually quite a few other interesting photographers listed on HigherPictures, such as Barabara Crane, and her Private Views project:

Might as well check most of them out, as they’re all pretty awesome.

Music video for the song Dayvan Cowboy by Boards of Canada. The footage used at the beginning is taken from the video of Joe Kittinger’s famous parachute jump from an altitude of 19.5 miles. This is something that I still listen to and watch with the same fervour with which I experienced it for the first time. I highly recommend their music.

From a small collection of nuclear explosions.

Footage captured by German cameramen. Both impressive and disturbing.

If you have any problems loading the video, just double click it and it’ll take you to it’s original page where it should load.

I’ve been playing around with my new Contax G2 Rangefinder which my dad recently “passed down” to me. He’s had it for ages, and it’s still in mint condition. It’s a great little point and shoot, and is pretty much fully manual, but in a really spasticated way. For example, manual focusing isn’t done on the lens as you don’t aim with it when you look through the viewfinder, but rather with some strange metering system where you have to line up some dots. Haven’t really explored it that much as I’ve only shot one roll, but I really like it so far. More to come I guess.

My dog, she’s bloody useless sometimes:

Max D’Arche: