Today I was talking to a friend about this blog and having told her that I was brainstorming new ideas and potential changes to it, she mentioned how in her view, the thing the blog could need is even more pictures. You can imagine that made me feel great. So I brainstormed the matter and I noticed how recently I’ve been majorly neglecting my colour pictures and only posted black and whites.
To celebrate colour, here’s one of my favourites, and I know at least one person who will tell me how this picture gives her headache, but nonetheless …I guess “It is a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart” (according to Ulyses Everett McGill from Oh Brother Where Art Thou), I love this picture. I posted it a long time ago on my deviantART account as a wallpaper. Now why I named it “regret”, I do not remember any more. Here below is a re-edit, scaled down. If you like it and would like it as a wallpaper for your computer go here.
And here is a song I’ve been listening to recently; it helps with the brainstorming and goes well with the image.
Music: Michael Nyman – The Promise (From the The Piano movie soundtrack)
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I just haven’t gotten around to posting much this December, yet so much has happened. Since one of my new year’s resolutions is to blog more and more successfully photo-journalize my own life, here’s my first move towards this goal. This December …
Stefan Hrusca is one of the icons of Romanian folk music. I grew up with his songs and it was a delightful walk down memory lane going to this year’s Christmas concert. But apart from my personal pleasure, the fact that, Stefan Hrusca is travelling the world singing traditional folk Christmas carols for Romanians everywhere, has a yet more significant role.
Stefan Hrusca’s musical career started in 1981, during the Communist regime in Romania, under the guidance of poet: Adrian Paunescu who in spite of the anti-religious stance of the Communist regime, managed to collect and maintain Romanian Christian folklore so as to avoid it being lost forever.
In this day, when Romania is no longer Communist and the political regime is no longer restricting religious rites, Romania is still in danger of losing its Christian folklore due to the ever growing digitalization of life. Stefan Hrusca, however, is still around and I predict will not let the heritage of ages go down any time soon!
Family Portraits: The Rabens
Alex, you can see him below with his girlfriend, has been a close friend of mine since grade 10. His parents asked me if I could come over on December 26th if I could come over and do a portrait session with them. On my side it was a huge pleasure, I don’t however know about him, he usually hated having his picture taken and therefore I’d like to extend a huge “Thank you!” to him for going along with all the “torture” I put them though, moving them from one chair to another. What a beautiful family! See some sneak peeks!
Sibling love…
Mr. and Mrs. Raben …and Riley, the awesomely cute Hungarian shepherd dog, the newest addition to the Raben family
Spending an outrageously fun time with friends!
Bringing old technology back to life
I have been a Linux enthusiast since 1999 when I first accidentally read about it in a magazine. Recently, as my friend Alex (you can see him in images above) purchased a new laptop, I had the chance to “bring back to life” his old laptop, which he was ready to throw in the garbage.
The machine is a beauty, branded Ferrari. It features a 2GhZ 64bit processor, some 1GB of RAM and a 15inch screen. Sure, it is rather heavier than most machines bought today, gets warmer, quicklier, but hardly ready for the garbage bin!
Below you can see images of it, as I brought it home and placed it on my work desk. It was originally running Windows XP (no wonder it was running slow). At first I popped in a Ubuntu Live CD to see how much processing power the machine really had and how much hard drive space I get to work with.
The Ferrari laptop. Featuring: one 2 GhZ processor @ 64bits; 1GB of RAM; 100GB hard drive space; 15” screen @ 1680px X 1050px native resolution.
[CLICK TO VIEW FULL SIZE IMAGE] The laptop running the Ubuntu Linux 9.04 off of the Live CD, before making any changes to it.
Once I noticed that the laptop was quite better than I expected (you can see the details highlighted on the screen), I proceeded installing a newer version of Linux on it. Ubuntu 10.10 – 64bit edition. This should take full advantage of the 64 bit capability of the processor.
[CLICK TO VIEW FULL SIZE IMAGE] The laptop running Ubuntu Linux 10.10 64 bit edition
I am very impressed with how the laptop responded after the installation! As expected, it got warm rather quickly, as back when this machine was built, dual cores were not yet popular, nor were the fans particularly efficient. The mouse-pad doesn’t work either (no idea how that ended up broken) and the screen has a small cut, but nothing that should really be an impediment to performance.
What a success story! Perhaps I will go further and install an extra gigabyte of RAM in it so I can easily edit two RAW files at once.
Marko Kovacevic is a friend of mine; a fellow photography enthusiast, a film connoisseur and somewhat of a daredevil at times. We met via google, as my name and one of my blog posts appeared when Marko was searching for images taken in abandoned buildings in the city of Kitchener, Ontario.
As a sidenote: My blog post was on the beautiful “Lady” Barra, which is more popularly known under the name of Barra Castle, a 1930s architectural masterpiece in Gothic style, which regrettably ceased to exist altogether in November 2010 after a few months of partial demolition under the plan of keeping its façade; which apparently changed sometime in the meantime and the City of Kitchener managed to entirely neglect the historical value of this building.
When Marko came across my blog post, written on January 27th, it was already summer time. I found it quite intriguing, considering I had never before acquainted someone over the internet under such conditions: them looking up information and thus finding me and being interested to getting to know me. In the following year and a half Marko and I became good friends, worked on projects together and I believe, broadened each other’s spectrum of interest when it comes to photography. I’ll be honest, if it weren’t for my friend Marko, my appreciation for film photography would be a lot less than it is now. He introduced me to both the physical machine that the Leica Rangefinder camera is, as well as the rangefinder ideology and philosophy, which puts the majority of the weight, when it comes to a photograph’s quality, on the content matter of that which is photographed, as opposed to the technological aspect details, like sharpness or dynamic range. But yeah, I’ll quit the dorky photographer talk; here’s the results of a photo-walk that Marko and I went for a few months ago, part of which became a portrait session. Due to his infatuation to the “film photography look”, I felt compelled to attempt to offer Marko images that would satisfy his high standards. I believe they did.
Back in November, I went on a photo walk with photographers Marko Kovacevic and Cristian Bodnari at Websters Falls, in Hamilton, Ont. The following photo essay should give you a better idea of what our photo walks are like; stylish, casual, fun!
