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Mostly photography and some other musings.

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Such a great and inspiring photographer.

I saw an exhibition with some of his pictures, some time ago, in London, at the Photographer’s Gallery. Pictures of ordinary things, mundane scenes of his life and places, things that could pass inadvertently to anyone else but him. The proof that you don’t really need fancy trips to remote and exotic places to find beauty.  Good weekend everyone! 🙂

Interesting bits of an interview to this famous photographer:

If you want to know more about him, I recommend watching the documentary film “McCullin”. I saw it a few months ago on BBC. It is amazing what this person has seen and lived. Most of us would have ended completely mad. Here is a review of this film from The Guardian.  And this post explains a lot more about his photography. Is interesting how he has moved from “war photographer”, a term he doesn’t like at all, to only make pictures of UK landscapes. It might sound like his very own personal way of retirement but still working on his passion.

I knew about this documentary ages ago, but never found the moment to watch it. It was released in 1992, and the name Baraka has a religious meaning in it. I enjoyed it a lot. You’ll need to be in a contemplative mood for really finding the beauty of this, if not, it can just be a boring sequence of videos. It shows views of different places in the world, life styles and cultures. You might even find some interesting meanings, maybe very personal ones, depending on your mood while watching the film. Photography is great. The use of time-lapse photography, now so fashionable, is amazing. And the music fits perfectly. Now I need to watch the second part, called Samsara. Good weekend!

I have a backlog of games not played/to be finished. In the not finished list, I have some very lengthy ones, that I have no idea when I will be able to finish. And what is worse, I’m afraid that the moment I try to come back to them, I might have forgotten about what the game was. It is like having to reopen an already started 500 pages book, and not remembering anything about it (Game of Thrones, I’m looking at you!). In the not played list, there are a few interesting ones.  One of them it’s called Braid. It was released a few years ago, but its been only recently that I  had  a bit of time to spend in it. This picture in their site explains the basic idea: Time manipulation.

This video show the thing in action:

Wonderful 2D art and great design. Worth your time and attention. At least it made me grab my xbox 360 controller at home again.

I’ve worked in games for more than 10 years, and what happens sometimes with that is you no longer play enough games at home. The usual comment from friends is: Ah, you must be playing all the day at the office!. Nothing farther from the truth!. This days I have very little time or interest in playing the nth iteration of a famous first person shooter, or spend hours analysing statistics in a Japanese RPG. And I did that in the past! A lot! But not any more.

Games like Braid are far more interesting to play for me now.  Some developers are trying to make less expensive games, but much more interesting than some big ones in the market now. What they do is avoid all the expensive procedures needed to publish a game and try other sorts of ways to get to the public. Also they have much smaller budgets, less staff, less everything. But sometimes a great idea behind. Here is an opinion of one developer about these associated costs. They created Super Meat Boy, an extremely fun (but hard to master) platforming game. It was a success. Now, they seem to be reluctant to all this new next-gen consoles:

“The overhead cost of just developing for those consoles is insane,” continued Refenes.
“It costs zero dollars to develop on Steam if you already have a computer. When you look at PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo you have to buy thousand dollar dev kits and pay for certification and pay for testing and pay for localisation – you have to do all these things and at the end of the day it’s like, ‘I could have developed for other platforms and it would’ve been easier.'”
This overhead makes it risky for independents to get behind new platforms without some guarantee of their success.
“You have to take into consideration that when you’re independent, you don’t want to take the risk of jumping on a platform that you have no idea how it’s going to do until it’s already established,” said McMillen.
via Team Meat has no plans for next-gen | Game Development | News by Develop.

“Indie games: the movie” is an interesting documentary film about these kind of games and how they are developed. Basically, lots of hard work, time, passion and dedication. Watch it when you have time! 🙂

I recently watched “Anton Corbijn Inside Out” documentary. I found it particularly fascinating. For sure you have seen some of his famous photographs. If you ever have had an album from Joy division, U2, Rem, Nirvana, or Depeche mode, to name only a few, you have seen one. They are usually high contrast black and white, and in some cases with cross processed film colours. Portraits of famous bands, with dramatic backgrounds.

In this documentary he talks about why he photographs music bands, and how that helped him to overcome his difficulties to relate to people. How his relationship with his family made him like he is now. Some aspects of his photography are discussed also, like the use of old film cameras to this date and his innate ability to see compositional aspects in an image, a thing that normal people learning about photography like me will struggle forever… 🙂 The documentary goes quite intimate, and at some point it looks almost like a filmed therapy session. There are some nice parts where people who has been photographed by him praise his job in some or another way. And the guy seems incredibly humble.

After watching this, I decided to have a look at his latest film, “The American”. He was the director. Critics have called this one an “anti Bond” film. People was expecting  a more action packed kind of film, and it is not. It’s rather introspective.

Here, the Metacritic reviews score for “The American”, and here is interview with him.