For the Week of Nov. 15- Hajj, part 1

 These photos are all from the 2010 annual hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. All Muslims who are able are expected to make the journey once in their life. Millions of people come into Saudi Arabia every year for it. Here, men stand from the top of Noor mountain, looking onto Mecca. I love the feeling of intimacy we get with the silhouettes of the men, framed by city lights. It's a highly mysterious and somehow still holy-seeming photo. 

 Sometimes, I tend to think of America as the epicenter of the world, downplaying all other regions and their religions subconsciously. This photo of Muslim pilgrims circling the Kaaba at the center of the Grand mosque in Mecca is a tiny percentage of the world's 1 billion Muslims, and yet you get a true feeling that this place and these people are at the center of the world.

Here, pilgrims move around the kaaba inside the Grand Mosque. The long time exposure gives you a sense of the movement and quickness with which the outer spectators pray, compared to the inner group, who is content to remain near the kaaba longer without moving. Again, it looks like the center of the world.

For Week of Nov. 8- More snow!

 This is a long-exposure picture of an annual torchlit ski run in Colorado. It's confusing, because at first it looks like car headlights, but they are fire-colored, and who could drive so safely on that snow?

 Street performers near a gate in Berlin. I like the whimsy in this picture, how it looks like a movie still at first, but you realize quickly that there is something distinctly un-American about it, despite the American subject. What Star Wars would look like if it was set in Pennsylvania...or Berlin.

"The sun breaks through the fog over the inner harbor as below zero temperatures grip Stockholm, Sweden." How crazy is this? Because you cannot see any other identifying landmarks, it looks like it might be a shot from the 19th century, and the sun sort of looks like the moon. It's like Never Land, where there are two suns and moons. The dim building outlines look almost like mountains, and the color is beautiful, pinks and grays. 

For the Week of Nov. 1- Snow!

 I am wishing for snow lately, and so this and the following post are going to be dedicated to some beautiful frozen condensation. I love this photo because it would be interesting enough with the mountain range and city lights in the valley, but the stars in time-lapse are incredible, and I've never seen a picture like that taken in this setting. Looks unreal.

 This looks a lot like what Mercer looked like last winter, with snow illuminated by the lampposts in a warm orange light. This photo gives the feeling of safeness, softness, of being outside in fresh snow at nighttime, which I used to enjoy when I lived in Pennsylvania. The backlighting is beautiful.

I can't remember where this is, but at first, it looks like waves or heat waves in the desert with a strange mist and mirage. Instead, it's strangely blown snow and fog in Switzerland. Very mysterious, symmetrical, and visually pleasing. The snow detail in the foreground is very pretty, looks like glitter.

For week of Oct. 25- Awesome Time and Motion

 This post is to celebrate some rather brilliant time and motion photos. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with creative ways to capture and abstract things using time and motion for our project, and now, I constantly notice the use of time and motion in photography. The above photo is of moths flying around an outside light. You don't notice their flight patterns or their wing shape very much until being able to track their motion with a slow shutter speed. 

 This is a famous landmark road in Angola. The fog and near-60-second-exposure help capture what looks like fairy flights or snakes of light or fire. It makes this photo look like a movie still or fantasy landscape.

A woman in Bangladesh rides in between train cars to keep from having to pay for a ticket. With the sun and time of day, it would have been easy for the photographer to stop the train tracks underneath. However, I like the sense of motion and danger one gets from a moving ground underneath the photo's subject. It gives the viewer a sense of riding with the woman.

For week of Oct. 18- Beautiful storms

One of my favorite things to do to give myself the heeby jeebies is to look at pictures and watch videos of storm cells and tornadoes. I love storm photos. I think it is the comfort of knowing I will not be swept away but being allowed to watch nature's awesome, awful, destructive show in the sky. This photo above was entered into the National Geographic photo contest, in Montana. It looks unreal. I didn't know the sky could form itself into something this twisted and beautiful.

 

  I like the vertical motion of this photo. Often, skies look horizontal in pictures, with viewers forgetting that the sky continues above and behind and all around us. I like that we see so much of the sky, and that the clouds seem in motion, perfectly and abstractly sculpted.

I do not understand this photo, and there is little info in its caption: "Cosmic. Mother nature doing what she does best," by Patrick John O'Doherty. I have no idea what element or force of nature is going on, but it looks like heaven and is still quite clearly earth. Glorious. I love to be absorbed into it.

For week of Oct. 11- An Edwardian Family Album

I was searching for artistic renditions of family albums on Google and home upon these examples from an amateur photographer named Jack Urton, an amateur but skilled photographer during the turn of the 19th century. 480 negatives were discovered in a cupboard in an old house in Liverpool, England a few years ago, and these photos have been shown in museums as documentation of an average middle class family's life during the late 1800s.

They are not anything groundbreaking, but they are incredible in portraying aspects of life rarely documented during that era--most photographs we see from the time are formal portraits. They almost seem to sweet, too perfect to be true. Like Mary Poppins come to life. They are intimate, yet educational.

I find this one to be especially beautiful, with sky and land both dramatically captured by film in a way that digital isn't able to do without combining multiple exposures.

Week of Oct. 4- Monochromatics!

Forgive me, these three photos were supposed to be put up for last week, so please count them as last week's blog post! I started messing around on Flickr looking for interesting use of monochromatic color in photos, and here are a few of my favorites. The red is called "Running from Myself" or something like that. The total redness of the picture gives it a distinct feeling of panic or eeriness that I don't think would be there were it to be beige, or blue, etc. Very interesting use of color to influence how the photo feels.

 Oh, I love this one. It's blue/teal. I almost used my old blue ocscillating fan for my monochromatic picture. The bubble is an ingenious idea. Thing is, I was going to use bubbles in a bathtub for white--I didn't think about bubbles looking blue around their edges! It's whimsical and made more attractive to look at with its single shade of sea foam.

I liked the simplicity of this white-on-white still life. I think these are golden delicious apples, so somehow they must have manipulated the color. The use of the apples on the old whitewashed board give it a country twinge, but there's also a decidedly modern feel because of the use of only white and the simple lines. Very nice!