Photographic Hero

 Rui Palha

  We were asked to pick a photographer whose work we admire. Let me tell you, it was not easy. I stumbled across Rui's Flickr account and fell in love with his work. I find that there is something very nostalgic about a lot of his work. There were times where I found his work confusing and I had to stare at it for a it before I could see what he was doing in the picture, kind of like one of the crazy pictures that you stare at, and after a while a 3D picture pops out at you.


   Rui is still living. And for this I was very thankful! I e-mailed him and he was kind enough to answer some questions, although, not as detailed as I would have liked, but as he was doing me a favour, I didn't want to push it.


   Rui no longer uses B&W film as his medium of choice, he has gone mostly digital in the past couple of years. There are several reasons for this, one is health and he is required to walk everyday and so taking the number of pictures that he does has just gotten to expensive to do in film. Another reason is that no longer has a darkroom of his own. He admitted that he doesn't like the dark room work any more. He didn't mind it when he was younger but finds it too tedious now. And since he doesn't trust the commercial labs, he had gone digital.


  For Rui, the gear is not important! He reiterated that several times in our e-mails. What is important, he said, is the "eye" behind the camera. So I have no idea what type of a camera Rui used, other than  a 35mm film SLR. His film of preference is/was the Kodak TRI-X with a ISO 400. If he needed to he would push it to ISO 800 or ISO 1600. One thing that I discovered about Rui that I love, is that he does all his cropping in-camera, what you see is the original image. He never crops in post-processing.


  Here are some of my favourite of Rui's pics:

  I love this picture! It makes me want to go jump in a puddle. The lighting and the timing in this picture are perfect! I wouldn't change a thing about it. The figure is in the top third of the frame, but the street draws your eye up through the frame. It has just the right amount of contrast as well. Part of the reason I love this picture is that it has a sort of 1950's feel to it, it draws me to what was a simpler time, and although I wasn't born yet, I like to imagine what it was like.

   This picture made want to take up surfing! Not that I would ever do something so dangerous, but it was an entertaining thought. Again, the lighting is wonderful and soft, thanks to the water. The water is clear and crisp as it is cascading over the edge. I love that he used a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion of the water to give us those fabulous lines. I wish I could join the figure on the bike on a ride behind the water.

   I love how Rui captured the boy's personality in this picture. Just look at the attitude in the tilt of his chin and the gleam in his eye. This pictures makes me smile. Compositionally, it is very simple, but effective. The boy's eyes are on a line of thirds, it looks like he took advantage of some really nice soft lighting. I love the subtle nuances that the grain gives to this picture.

Symbols

Hello,

  So we had an assignment on Symbols. Symbols for love, envy and peace. We had to pick a final picture and blog about it, so here is me blogging about it...

  Love, that is my final image. As soon as we got the assignment I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I am a die hard romantic and so I had fun with this symbol. To me, when I think of love, I think of romance and commitment. What better symbols to use than a rose and an engagement ring? An engagement ring that belonged to my great-grandmother (since I don't have one ;) ).

  The biggest decision that I made in regards to this picture was the lighting. I had some really nice side sun lighting that was diffused by a curtain, so it gave me some really nice soft lighting. I shot in aperture priority because I really wanted to try and control my depth of field.

  I didn't realize what a challenge it was going to be taking pictures of an engagement ring. The ring I picked had diamonds in it and I picked because I thought it was pretty and sparkly! It didn't occur to me that sparkle is really hard to capture and in most of my pictures it blurred the shape of the stones, even though there was no direct light on the ring itself and the ring had been sharp in my viewfinder. I found out I would've been better off with a simple gold band, but figured that one out too late. Oh well. It just occurred to me that I should've tried to backlight it. I think I'll try that this afternoon and see if it works.