Thursday, June 3, 2010

M. Hulot's Holiday



The first time I saw Jacques Tati's humorous (and one of his most famous) film Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, I fell in love. It was last summer. I fell in love with the visual satire (clumsy Hulot played by Tati himself), the romantically washed out black and whites, the minimal script, and the way it makes me want to skip town for the South of France (if only). Read: makes me feel happy.

On that note, let's reinforce that although how some learned photographers can become too technical for their own good--

(Think "this is no good, imperfect print quality!"- a theory that M. Tichy has completely blown out of the water.)

-- the end goal is nothing if not to stir up a little emotion.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Image Studies

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects to starting a photo project is choosing the subject matter. Once a focal point is established, the project begins to develop cohesive property and a smooth flow, but until then it can be quite disconnected. Who hasn't encountered such frustration regardless of genre.

It is no wonder then that some of my favorite image blogs all share this quality - a tight focus. After years of daily posts, these blogs become an awesome image backlog of their subject matter. I would even go as far as saying that they will have become a database.

I think you will find that these two do a particularly good job at that - in the fashion blog category: Le Smoking (beautiful people smoking) and The Impossible Cool (title says it all). Neither contain any text apart from photo credits, but I think if they started referencing back and commenting they might kick it up a notch. Or maybe better left an open book. What do you think? Any others you have encountered?

Image source (all): Le Smoking