Monday, August 16, 2010

It's time for the Fringe in Edinburgh!

It's August, and as usual Edinburgh is home to a number of great festivals: Edinburgh National Festival, Edinburgh Book Festival, Fringe and probably a few more. But it is Fringe's tradition, that artists take over the Royal Mile and advertise their performances there. And if you're in Edinburgh during this time, you'll be overwhelmed by the festivals' atmosphere! Here is what I was able to capture last Saturday.

Some people were quite friendly and posing quite happily - like this man giving away leaflets for one of the shows.


Saturday, August 14, 2010

Welcome!

Here we go!

Welcome to my very own blog. It all started a couple of years ago, when I first started to take photography seriously. It was very long time ago, in a country far, far away... Actually... it was about 10 years ago in the city of Wroclaw, Poland.



My first camera given to my by my father was a russian Zenit-E - a SLR that a limited series was made for the 1980 olympics that took place in Moscow. The camera itself was a typical soviet construction - bulky, heavy, not very precise and certainly not user-friendly. But it worked and the quality of images it produced was just way above what I could have done so far(with my very own point-and-shoot Kodak 35mm camera). So I started to read about all those things, that I had never heard of - exposure, composition, depth of field... a whole new world.

I used my Zenit for about a year learning about all those new things and just soaking up all that knowledge. But how far can you go with just one prime lens(a Zenit standard Helios 58mm f/2) when you're so eager to explore new grounds and try new techniques. So I started looking for a new pieces of kit to play around and ened up with a great piece of german technology - Practica MTL-3 with great Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 lens. It is so good, that I still have it and it works perfectly!

After another year or so of experimenting with all kinds of subjects, and all kinds of photography, I decided to get a 'real' camera and I bought my first modern SLR. It was a Canon EOS 300V camera - best I could afford at the time being a student. Along with its standard zoom it offered a great deal of versatility and new posibilities. And it served me well for a good 2 or three years - up to the point when it was a high time to move into digital photography. I have already moved to Glasgow by that time to finish my last year of studies at Glasgow Caledonian University and I had just enough cash to get a brand new Nikon D40X - a basic but very well made entry level digital SLR. And this is the camera I still use today, and probably will be using for some time. It is this camera that gave me the most experience and helped me develop my photography skills to my current level. Thanks to digital revolution I didn't have to pay for films, developing, scanning and prints anymore. All I needed was my camera and my laptop.

And ever since I moved into digital photography I had an idea somewhere in my head of having some place on the internet where I can publish my work, get some feedback from other photographers and maybe somehow build up some kind of my own portfolio. For years I have tried by registering to all kind of community pages and ading images on photography forums and it has never turned out as I expected. For many reasons - mostly becouse it is very difficult to get into already existing communities, but also becouse I have never realy had a good idea how it should work and how it should look like.

But now I have. And this blog is a part of it. I call it my biggest photography project to date. To build my profile - as a photographer - from scratch. Through this blog, my portfolio website and a number of community pages.