I have a lot more pics from saturday’s rally so I thought it deserves another post. Here are some of them of all sorts of people who were there that day.
The Robin Hood tax rally pt.2
Category: Photo Blog
The Robin Hood tax rally
Last saturday I was taking pictures at a rally organized by “occupy vancouver”. It started with a speech from an economist on the benefits of implementing the robin hood tax, followed by a rhythmic march around downtown accompanied by mesmerizing samba beats. As economics student I found the tax proposal to be interesting and would encourage others to read up on it.
This is a picture of one of the musicians during the rally. I always imagined that saxophone is one of the hardest instruments to play. The intensity of his face reaffirms this belief.
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Why so “unrealistic”?
“It doesn’t look real” or “It’s like a painting” are some of the common comments I get on my pictures. Most of the time they are intended as a compliment and that’s how I take it. But I feel like people have an old fashioned perception of how a realistic photograph should look like and I don’t always agree with how unrealistic people claim them to be. The reason for the look I get is High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, which I use on a lot of my pictures. Our eyes are very unique in a way they capture light. They quickly adjust to very bright and very dark areas of any scene they set their sight on. Camera lenses however aren’t quite as awesome. There is always a trade off between overexposed and underexposed areas.
You can get around this by taking multiple pictures of different exposures. This allows to capture a lot of detail in both dark and bright areas that a single shot would ignore. Here’s a good example of what it really does. This is one of the oldest coffee shops in Ghent, Belgium. Scene of a nice, cosy looking place, which provides different levels of light, handy for our example. The lighting inside the shop is darker than it is outside. When I concentrate on the light outside almost all of the detail inside the shop is lost. If I adjust my exposure to address the inside then the outside is just blown out.
When you combine these 3 together you get the pic below (on the right). You be the judge of which one’s a better representation of the scene. I find the regular shot (first pic below) very boring and in fact untrue of the real scene. It doesn’t show all the things my eyes have really seen. It doesn’t show the lady by the counter in the dimly illuminated shop. I can barely even see what the inside of a shop looks like. There are no details to reaffirm the very old age of these fading green coloured doors.
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Quiet observer
I really enjoy taking random shots like this one, trying to capture a wee taste of the street or simply a fragment of someone’s life. Here nothing is planned and the spontaneity of the environment subtly suggest a subject and mood. It simply takes luck and a little attention to respond to it.
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Love locks
Today I’m feeling inspirational so I’ll be posting 3 whole pictures. The first one in particular has once been selected as a cover for my local university newspaper, a copy of which proudly collects dust somewhere in the corner of my room. All three pictures are from the same place in Prague, just next to the famous “Lennon wall”. Those who’ve been to Prague have probably seen both.
The story goes that couples/newlyweds come to this spot and put a lock onto the metal bar as a symbol of their strong, unbreakable, everlasting, solid as a lock love. I’ve seen a few similar places in Europe but this one stands out in my memory a little more than the others.
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On the way up the Chief
Stawamus Chief or just Chief as it’s known is the second largest granite monolith in the world standing at 700m high. It’s famous for rock climbing but there’s also a way to conquer this massive rock through a fairly short hike. On a good clear day one can find himself facing a great view, however, even on a cloudy day the excitement and thrill of looking down a cliff with a drop of several hundred meters is a feeling worth the hike by itself.
