THE HYENA & OTHER MEN

An impressive series of photos shot in Nigeria by south african photographer Pieter Hugo.

http://www.pieterhugo.com/nigeria/

“These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.”

Au hasard de mes pérégrinations sur Internet, je suis tombé sur le site du photographe allemand Michael Wolf dont le travail m’a touché.

http://www.photomichaelwolf.com

La série Hong Kong: Architecture of Density, dans sa géométrie démesurée, est fantastique. Ce qui frappe dans cette série c’est l’absence humaine, comme noyée dans ces monstres de surdensité, et les motifs géométriques qui se révélent grâce à la distance et forment des oeuvres abstraites surprenantes.

Hong Kong: Architecture of Density

Je tends à penser que si j’avais été dans le même lieu j’aurais pris les mêmes clichés, la maîtrise technique en moins. D’ailleurs l’idée d’une autre série, Hong Kong: Corner Houses, également remarquable, est proche de ce que j’ai tenté de faire avec ma petite série Street Corners, à une échelle plus modeste.

Photo de Michael Wolf à Hong Kong.

Une photo que j’ai prise à Osaka.

Loin de moi l’idée que j’aurais été capable de produire le même travail, mais le regard que je porte sur les choses, et notamment l’univers urbain, me semble proche du sien. J’ai l’impression de voir ce que j’aurais “vu”, et ça procure une certaine émotion.

On flickr yet.

This is definitely my favorite shot among all the photos I took in Egypt. Others are on flickr.

Photo by artour_a. He’s got a lot of great shots of insects.

I read some articles about HDR (High Dynamic Range) in photography which consists in shooting several pictures of the same scene at different exposures and then merging all of them in Photomatix for instance. Anyway I don’t really care about the technic but the end result is really great, not always but often.

Look at this, it was surely not such a great picture at the beginning.

from pingmag.jp

I tried to obtain the same effect just by playing with tones, colors, contrast, etc, on the picture below. I obviously failed but the result is not so bad actually.

This is Bangkok.

I found again someone who posts amazing photos on Flickr. Her nickname is Cypherone and she’s from Taiwan. Some photos look like drawings. I’d really like to know which post-effects to apply for getting such a result.

Toronto-based filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal followed the photograph Edward Burtynsky in China and Bangladesh and made the documentary “Manufactured Landscapes”: interview on PingMag.

The photo I submitted to “We Are All Photographers Now!” was projected on March 23, 12:32.
But nobody to see it!