Second Life for “NoArt”: it’s called “Photographically Curious”

The image above was taken in Jodhpur at the end of a beautiful day. I was leading six inquisitive photographers on an official photogether photo tour in India and was having a great time.

But I knew that I will be closing photogether. It had gotten to the point where I was spending all my “free” time on teaching courses, editing web pages, communicating with clients, booking conference rooms, editing presentations, marketing events, buying tea, coffee and sweets for the photo courses and a thousand other things. But I was not photographing and in general was too stressed to be creative at all. This was all running in parallel to a full-time job by the way…

Also I was not writing this blog. I had managed 190 postings in the 3,5 years from NoArt start to photogether start and only 3 postings in the 2,5 years from photogether start till today.

So on 01 January, 2013 I closed photogether, and now I find myself once again inspired to do new and creative things. I will be traveling a lot and photographing a lot and blogging again, but I won’t be blogging here.

In 2007 I chose the name “NoArt” because that’s what I was producing. But now I’ve got new ideas and new visions and basically a new life. So I’ve got a new blog, which I’m writing together with my girlfriend Katja.

It’s called “Photographically Curious”, and it’s at http://pcurious.wordpress.com/ or for Facebook Fans http://facebook.com/pcurious/

Please update your bookmarks and subscribe to the new blog, because NoArt will not be seeing any new postings any more and it will get deleted on 18 July, 2013.

Saul Leiter Retrospective in Hamburg

No, I’m not dead and this blog is not dead either. It’s just that I’ve not had anything worth reporting that is photography-related to in the last … year.

OK, I was on a very exciting two-week trip to Myanmar in December and January, but I haven’t even sorted out the image yet. Otherwise I’ve been so busy with photogether (getting the webpage up and running, organizing and describing trips, working out presentations for the technical courses) that I haven’t had a chance to go out and photograph. I’ve barely made about 50 images of my son during the last 12 months and that’s it!

(c) Saul Leiter

However today I did something worth writing about: I went to see Saul Leiter’s “Retrospective” in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. I was quite curious about this exhibit since my appreciation of Saul’s images has not been very pronounced in the past. I own two of his color books, but I was not familiar with his black-and-white work, and there ware many black-and-white images on display there. I also attended the first public screening of the documentary on Saul Leiter about a month ago, so I knew a good bit about the photographer before I attended the exhibit.

Well, what can I say? I am still not a big fan of Saul’s work… His images are complex, multi-layered, thought-provoking, (mostly) subtly colorful, all of which sounds very exciting, but I was not able to develop a relationship to his images.

On the other hand I did find 5 to 10 images that I’d like to own and look at, and the one below is a personal favorite. Maybe because it is not very typical for Saul…

(c) Saul Leiter

Al Di Meola and Peo Alfonsi in Hamburg

On July 5 this blog hat its fourth birthday (!!!), so I made myself a present — I went to see and photograph Al Di Meola and Peo Alfonsi at their concert in Die Fabrik in Hamburg. Actually I had a deal with Al’s Tour Manager to photograph the two exceptional musicians exclusively before the concert, but Al only got to Die Fabrik about 10 minutes before the start of the concert, so sadly, there was no time for that. Naturally I was quite unhappy, but at least I had plenty of good photo opportunities during the concert.

photogether — Turning Professional

My last posting lies almost three months back, but if you think that I haven’t been doing anything photographic lately, you couldn’t be any further from the truth…

In fact a very good friend of mine and I have finally taken the plunge and founded a photography-related company! Yes, all of our ideas about what we could do and want to do have finally come to fruition! We’ve named the company photogether, as in “photo” and “together,” and we are going to be offering a large palette of photographic services.

Klaus and his Three Younger Brothers

No auto-focus, no TTL flash and no matrix metering — all you need is a tripod, three manual flashes, a courageous mountain-biker and some patience.  Or quadruplets…

Related posts: 1, 2, 3.

Yellow like the Sun

I was driving home tonight, absent-mindedly listening to the radio when I saw this yellow building lit up by incredible sunset light.  So I had to stop by the side of the road and make a few images.

Flying with Hot Air

While in Trier I had another very interesting experience: three hot-air balloons were to take off in the late afternoon as part of an air-show in nearby Utscheid.  Hot-air balloons have fascinated me for a while now, so I didn’t have to think twice about whether to go or not.  As we got there the weather was beautiful and there were lots of flying activities, but the wind got stronger and stronger, so the balloons weren’t able to start.  But they did something at least as spectacular — a night-glow!

It was a great performance, but it wasn’t easy to shoot it.  The balloons were very bright and the surrounding area very dark (1/6″ at f/2.8 at ISO 1600), so I had to find a moment when both burners were just beginning to glow.  At full brightness it was either the balloons or the foreground, but not both.