As I logged in I realized how long it’s been since the last time and I felt ashamed. It took me quite a bit to pull myself out of the whirlwind that I got myself into recently. Let me tell you I have brainstormed the place I am at artistically, as well as businessi-ly and I found that my activity as well as my presentation to the world did not quite coincide with the place where I found myself to be. I have made some decisions about a few changes that you will notice in the next while, I will elaborate on them below; oh and feel free to press play on the following video. I personally enjoy some quiet inspirational music while reading and/or writing and perhaps I can share that with you.


End of Childhood – Jane Eyre Movie Soundtrack by Dario Marianelli. Once again I found an awesome soundtrack and I am quite excited to see to what extent the film will create the same emotions as the music alone.

Teaching Workshops:
As you may have noticed recently, at the top of this page you can find a link that takes you to my Workshop page. For a long time I had wanted to put together workshops on different photography topics and teach them. I have this thing, you see, about sharing the things that I care about with other like-minded people; or maybe it is me having a thing for hearing my own voice while having a bunch of people watching me (that would definitely explain my frequent visits to Little Bean Cafe on Thursdays for Karaoke). Either way, the Stefan Chirila Workshop series is here and it is here to stay, with a few additions to be expected during this coming summer.

The Blog:
Some of the more radical changes that are to come will in regards to the blog. One of the things I mind the most about it is the very fact that it is a blog, and not much more than a blog. At the very least I would like it to be more of a site, where people can get a more varied spectrum of information on what to expect from working with me as a photographer, and perhaps something for those who want to know more about me the living, breathing and sometimes biking, person. Besides this, I would also like the site to be a place where not only people looking for a photographer can find something useful to read; but also photographers themselves (tutorials, reviews) and art lovers (artwork critique). I am even thinking about moving towards the idea of a video blog, but for that I would have to first get over a few elements of my shy nature, so don’t get your hopes up too soon.

Either way, in order to accommodate these notions, a new design is needed. I insist on something simple and intuitive, where the command controls do not overpower the mood that the web site is meant to set. So in other words, due to me being so picky, I am bound to design the new interface, again, from scratch, as I have for the one present now. Here is a sample of my creative design process for the new look of the blog/site. It doesn’t look too incredibly different, yet anyway, since there are some integral parts of the present design that I like quite a lot and that I will keep.

The menu, however will be slightly different, which, regrettably, is a part of the design not showing in this image. It will however be rather intuitive and accommodate both the standard screen sizes as well as the ultra-large Mac monitors (that I am so jealous of), as well as mobile devices such as iPhones, or some of the more modest screen resolutions (such as 800×600).

Fund Raiser for world-wide education

A friend of mine who is an aspiring journalist, Brigitte Szucs pointed me recently to this video that she made in regards to a fund raiser.

It is possible to donate directly through this web site.

New images:
Now, for those of you who have been hungering for some new visual material from me, here are the images:


Pianist: Beatriz Boizan


Pianist: Beatriz Boizan


With a few friends, Maria, Robyn and Juan David at Hilton Falls, Ontario | We were roasting some sausages, some shrimp skewers and shared a bottle of rose wine. It was a great way to spend a day celebrating love and togetherness.


Maria – At Hilton Falls, Ontario


Corinna – At Hilton Falls, Ontario | Corinna is from Germany; visiting Canada, after having been to New Zealand and the U.S.A. We met at Little Bean Cafe about a month ago at a game of Foosball and quickly befriended. She is not as dorky as I am when it comes to photography but loves it nevertheless.


Corinna – At Hilton Falls, Ontario


Corinna


At Hilton Falls, Ontario


Squirrel At Hilton Falls, Ontario | When we entered the park we were given some seeds to feed the birds. That squirrel however, proved to have been way hungrier than any of the birds. In an excess of courage, it attacked the seed bag that was on the pick-nick table next to us. I didn’t even have the camera handy at first, but the squirrel kept coming back, so eventually I got lucky.


Taken March 16 2011, 4 days before the full moon. The moon was the closest to Earth that it had been for 20 years during that time. Buy this as a high quality enlarged print here.

Posted in artistic, forPhotographers, friends, opinions, preview |

Today was April the 7th. Once this day meant a huge lot to me, by some dubbed the day of completeness. Today started off on a sad note in regards to this, but soon I came to understand that throughout my life fate threw way more things at me worth celebrating than those that I mourned.

I embarked on an unforgettable afternoon with some of my best friends to Hilton Falls where we hiked, explored, discovered, loved, laughed, (of course) photographed, grilled, ate and felt like we belonged together. It was wonderful, awesomely amazing and unforgettable. I will post images …tomorrow! Tonight I am debating whether I have enough energy left to crawl into bed, after having woken up at 8AM, having hiked, eaten, drive, then eaten again, karaoked until my last breath AND picked a friend up from the side of the Highway 401 where her Greyhound bus had lost a tire…

But before I say good night; here’s to celebrating the great moments of the past and the hope that the future can hold. Indeed, long live all the mountains we moved, we will be remembered =)

Posted in friends, meets, music, opinions, photowalk, portraits |

It was roughly five weeks ago that I started the Photographing Consciously workshop for the very first time. Although spiced with a few moments of uncertainty and occasional worry (and the unexpected loss of my key chain somewhere along the way), the entire endeavour functioned more or less as expected. Here are a few documentary shots, courtesy of Roxana Chiriac (one of the attendees who proves to be very good at the practice of documentary photography):

As part of the workshop, we also went on two photowalks; one to Hilton Falls, to do some nature photography and the second to University of Waterloo, to practice documentary photography. Here are a few samples from the photowalks:

A big THANK YOU goes out to everyone who came out each week and turned this into a fantastic experience! I am very much looking forward to next time (sometime in April most likely!).

Also: More information about the Photographing Consciously workshop, as well as the dates of the next instance can be found if you click below:

Posted in events, forPhotographers, friends, meets, photowalk, portraits, Uncategorized, workshop |

This is more of a personal reflection entry, so expect an insight into my strange mind in the following lines. In 6 days I will start teaching my “Photographing Consciously” workshop. I am very excited and very much looking forward to it. Photography has occupied a whole lot of my time recently, in the past year at least, most of my time. At point in time I was faced with questioning its relevance to certain degrees, its importance, value, purpose; moreso in the past, as recently I received clearer answers to the questions I was posing. I don’t know if I mentioned this in previous journal entries, and it may come as a scandalous and surprising statement from me, a now-mostly-portrait-photographer, but in my early days of portrait photography I was relatively far from appreciating the value of images featuring people, in or not in the midst of their daily activities. I know, what a childish approach to photography, only seeing the value of recording the beauty of the tree-lined biking trails, which were and still are more or less threatened by the urban expansion in my home town. Initially I would photograph them in order to share the sights that impressed me, with those that would not join me on my cycling expeditions, later in order to conserve sights that would soon disappear behind the foundations of houses commercial complexes. Photographing people did not appeal to me much back then.

What changed my mind were two elements. At first, coaxed by my girlfriend to take self-portraits, I learned the craft of photographing people, and eventually went on photographing others than myself, only to find that so easily and well done photograph would put a smile on an otherwise sad face. That very much impressed me. I started to see value in this people centred way of doing photography. A second element was the realization that indeed, as frail and insignificant as it may seem, at first sight, to freeze a mere 1/100 of a second for the future to look back upon as representing a whole summer or a whole year, it is magnificent to live through the experience of coming upon images, forgotten, that attest to a time, now well in the past, that your mind attributes great valour to. Even if the images are only two or three. They can bring back more than just other images that would fill in the gap of other events in a day; some things you may have thought would be buried in your memory forever, irrecoverable.

I later stumbled upon street photography and eventually documentary photography/photo journalism which took me further down the path towards greater appreciation for this craft.

“Why photograph war? Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior, which has existed throughout history, by the means of photography. The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance, yet that very idea has motivated me. For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity, if war is an attempt to negate humanity then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war and if its used well it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war.

In a way, if an individual assumes the risk of placing himself in the middle of a war in order to communicate to the rest of the world what’s happening, he’s trying to negotiate for peace. Perhaps that’s the reason for those in charge of perpetuating the war do not like to have photographers around. In the field where your experience is extremely immediate, what you see is not an image in the page of a magazine ten thousand miles away with the advertisements for Rolex watches on the next page, what you see is unmitigated pain, injustice and misery. Its occurred to me that if everyone could be there just once, to see for themselves what white phosphorous does to the face of a child, of what unspeakable pain the impact of a single bullet or how a jagged piece of shrapnel rips someones leg off. If everyone could be there to see for themselves the fear and the grief just one time, then they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.

But everyone cannot be there and that is why photographers go there, to show them, to reach out and grab them, to make them stop what they are doing and pay attention to what is going on. To create pictures powerful enough to overcome the deluding effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference, to protest and by the strength of that protest to make others protest!

” – Photographer: James Nachtwey


Photograph by James Nachtwey

Download the documentary War Photographer, about James Nachtwey

It is obviously his passion and hope for change that drive this man to go to the places where others dare not, and where for others it is not safe, in order to raise awareness.

On that note, that of passion, I would like to share some thoughts that I’ve had today in regards to a piece of visual art, the film Black Swan. For those who have not yet seen it, I do not wish to ruin it, so I will go straight to my point. The film brings up the notion that sex, as in seduction, has a very big impact within art, giving it greater amplitude. This notion has brought me back to a line of thought that I had walked a long time ago and that had remained somewhat unanswered for me. Do elements of seduction, or elements hinting at sexuality really make art more likeable?

To be honest, I am a bit bothered by the thought. Just like I feel treated like an animal when I see a commercial advertisement on television featuring a woman in a seductive pose next to the object advertised, not having much or anything to do with that object; simply for the purpose of creating interest in the object advertised. For example:

I am wondering, could one not create very appealing artwork without the sexually seductive element in it. Does sex really play such a vital role in art; or perhaps there is another element that is present and which can be isolated and implemented in other, non-sex-based pieces of art. My eventual conclusion was that it was the element of “passion” that I was looking for. Passion is the element that creates excitement when encountered in artwork. Whenever the viewer can detect it, in the eyes, or actions of the characters in the piece of art, the viewer relates to it and that passion is awoken within his/her heart. That is why, if you notice in the images above, all of them powerful artworks, but not all of them featuring potentially seductive themes, at least not the last three. Whenever passion is present, art is enriched. But where then do the sexual elements fit in, in all this and why do they seem powerful? Although it may not necessarily be the fact that they contain sexual material that makes them powerful, they do however contain material that inspires passion. Sex is after all one of those things that really easily affects emotionally. One enjoys art when one can easily relate to it, and this overused means to create emotion is one that is easy to relate to.

Posted in artistic, forPhotographers, opinions |