What Day Is It Again?

Having recently gotten back from being out of the country for the past week, I need a day to settle back into my normal routine. I spent the last seven days barely knowing the day/date so I need to recalibrate! In the meanwhile, here's some bokeh for your morning, best enjoyed with a nice coffee.


Updates on my vacation coming soon as well as the past couple of Sunday Seven entries posted retroactively. Happy Monday!

I Hope So.

Today is a bokeh/desaturated kind of day.

[via]

Feeling better this Wednesday, but to be honest it's been hard to shake this mood. I feel muted, like the colors in the photograph -- if that makes any sense. I'll be thankful for the upcoming weekend, and then Spring Break shortly after that (I get to fly fly fly away and escape for a while).

Photography: Peter Funch | Babel Tales.

Here's my second NYC post in three days. Hmmm ... maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

Danish photographer Peter Funch (pronounced "funk") posts up on the same spot on city sidewalks and takes pictures of New Yorkers. Okay, nothing special there. But then he fires up Photoshop and does something undeniably awesome.

For a series entitled "Babel Tales", he photographs people who are similar in some sort of way -- flower-carriers, smokers, black-clad business people, even children -- and placed all of them into the same picture. Peep skills:


This is brilliant and hilarious stuff.

However, in a discussion about "Babel Tales" in Flickr's Hardcore Street Photography group, some people derided Funch's work as having "the same ... boring-ass cliches", being "one step away at most from advertising photography" and not being "honest [enough] in its untruthfulness" (WTF does that even mean?). People need to fall back with that. I can see how some might call it "gimmicky" but by the same token, so is bokeh and HDR. You can't front like this didn't involve some fair amount of talent behind both the lens and the keyboard. To my amateur eyes, this series is quite original, well-executed and technically seamless. I view it as a playful, entertaining exercise in capturing people on the right day in the right moment and, if you wanna stretch it, a study in human nature.

Make sure your Photoshop Selection Tool game is strong if you want to emulate this.

An Urban Evening.

Sometimes I want it to be nighttime all the time. (But not nail-bitingly cold like in Alaska.) Taking a quick break from studying to post a bokeh video clip that matches the "noir" feeling I've had the past several days.

[Edit: The creator of the video disabled embedding, so here's a direct link to it on Vimeo.]

I like the mood and atmosphere of the fuzzy city lights, glowing warmly behind curls of steam and interrupted by the occasional pedestrian or taxi. It seems to complement a quiet "winter" type of urban evening, without all the snow that bombarded New York earlier today (and to a much smaller degree, Kansas City this past weekend). For some reason the video feels very comfortable to me. I don't know why. Enjoy it anyway.

Oh hey, wish me luck on my test tomorrow.