Life of Tree

I took this in Jeju-do last summer with Bessa R3M and Ektar 100.

Life of Tree

From Baghdad

Servants begin to gather around. They are efficient and quick and all of them wear
their blond hair tied up, knotted. Then it strikes me that all of them wear nothing but
aprons. ”Wow… Quite a guy.” I think again.
Baghdad 2006, by Jaakko Saari

Updated WordPress

I finally got around to updating my WordPress to the current version 3.5.1. The automatic  update didn’t work so I had to do some fiddling with terminal. I realize how quickly I forget about that stuff..

Anyway I notice some really nice improvements about new WP, especially the new media manager.

Yesterdays Party

It was such a nice party yesterday in Bar Sara. I was surprised so many people came to the party, both old and new friends.

When you keep exhibition, at some point you really have to face yourself as a person or as an artist. It’s always a process and not especially easy one.

But I thought, perhaps this is beginning of new era in my art life and in my personal life too. Perhaps more spiritual things will come.

Really, thank you for coming. You made the event special. If you are around Gakugei Daigaku area, please come and see the exhibition. It’s until 9th of June.

From the Depths of Lizard Point

Although this one didn’t make it to the final artwork, I still love this image because it conveys so much.

Actually, the black cloth was just an experiment what I wanted to try in addition to the main set-up, a torn black camisole which exposed her much more. I shot about four rolls of TMax 400 with her wearing the camisole. Those images turned out to be cool, but it was finally the chemistry with her body and this simple black cloth which really conveyed the idea.

It was really such pleasure to work with Yuki since she has so strong talent and intuition both as an artist and as a model. It wouldn’t have been possible to make this with anyone else. I’m also very grateful for our comrade Paulo who shot video of our shooting and gave a great help for us.

I made silver gelatin prints of the five final images in Dark Room Intl. with kind guidance from the staff. These are the final prints that you will see in exhibition.  I love the feel of traditional dark room prints because every print is unique, like an artwork itself. It’s the spirit of human feeling that I wanted to convey with these works, so I’m glad I decided to use analog media.

If you’d ask me now,  “If you would keep exhibition, what kind of images would you show to convey your own inner world?” I would answer, “images like these”.

It's about the Ads

It seems now that the whole point about the Flickr pricing change is to introduce ads to the customers.

The old Pro membership cost $24.95 and the new ad-free Flickr costs $49,99, as mentioned here.

I rather keep paying the Pro membership and stay happy with unlimited uploads and no ads. I am lucky to have once been pro, since those memberships are no longer being sold. Currently you just have to choose between the three, free member, ad-free or the crazy oddball  $499,99 two terabyte plan (which comes with ads I assume).

But who knows, the ads might start to appear to the old pro accounts, there’s nothing stopping Flickr doing that I guess. If that’s going to happen, I am just going to downgrade.

Shitty thing, really.