I am in a state, where I really want to explore more of my photos. This in mind means: What can I get out of old photos I did not get out at that time of taking them. Maybe I can improve them or at least do something else to it.
This is a small series of melancholy photos of my girlfriend at this culture institute. I loved the wall and the shadows. Beware, it gets dark!
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This time I want to present you Marius, who was delighted to take some photo with me – and after all, so was I! It was kind of a fashion shoot, because of his very great clothing style. We walked around some areas of cologne, mostly in Deutz. These are the first very selected photos I took of him, representing a small series.
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These are some photos of my trip to Porto a couple of weeks ago. I hope you like them!
Does anybody else have been there? Did you like it?
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Letzten März durfte ich Daniel und Kamila bei ihrer standesamtlichen Trauung in Pulheim begleiten. Es war kein großartig sonniger Tag, jedoch war keiner betrübt an diesem Tag, denn hier wurde schließlich eine neue Familie gegründet. Es war mir besonders wichtig die Momente einzufangen, die für die beiden für lange Zeit nach diesem Tag noch in guter Erinnerung bleiben soll. Im kleinen Kreis wurde zunächst die Trauung durchgeführt und nachher haben Daniel, Kamila und ich noch kurz Fotos in der Nähe des Standesamtes machen können. Vielen Dank nochmal und ich hoffe euch gefallen die Fotos!
You probably know the feeling to have a passion you want to pursuit, but you still need food to eat? For me it’s taking photos and while working at my current job I can’t do this of course. At my work I just look at photos of others, which motivates me, but at the same time it’s frustrating to be stuck at work and not being able to work on my own photos. I still have some things to publish, but I want to get it right and not publish it without any words written beside it. I got a huge to-do list and the other work is just absorbing my time. When I come home I am either too tired and just want to relax or I always think there is not so much time, so I spend more quality time with other people.
I tend to ignore the work and think almost everytime at work what I have to do to get further in my photography progress. My next big things will be another site, a real site, not a wordpress thingy. Additionally I want to get more photoshoots, asap please 😀
Getting back to the distracting work: There is always the dream of making your hobby your main income. That would be awesome of course. Nowadays I get some jobs with photography, but this could never be sufficiant to pay for everything I need. What’s the solution? Put all my time into it and try „to make it“? Or keep on working at my boring job, but not being able to pursuit other projects as much as I want to? I guess I need to do the second thing for a little bit longer.
I listen to a lot of Earl Nightingale, a radio speaker from the 50s, who did a lot of speeches about motivation, success and how to get it. In a lot of his speeches he describes success as the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal. I am lazy and forget a lot of things, therefore I need to listen to this almost every day to get it in my head. But when I eventually get it for the day I get quite motivated and do my boring work just as good, but with more fun, realizing that I will put this money not only into food etc, rather getting the needs for the other path I want to pursuit. It is always good to have a goal and to keep this in mind every day, even if you are currently not doing something right now in order to achieve it. I guess it’s really a mind thing (as always) and it needs to be nourished with good goals.
This is a rather personal post, I guess, so be warned.
I encountered several occasions where my photos were compared with photos of other photographers in my close circle. I am way behind those photographers, I know that. And this is somehow the problem. They are way more famous, way more popular with my friends and just have the leap forward I do not have. It takes time. I try to shoot more and more. I ask almost every friend if they want to take photos. I try to get better. Of course I get inspiration by other artists, films or just my own imagination. The latter seems so unimportant when it comes to similar photos to other photographers. In my case I always here something like „oh, you have a similar style to so and so„, „oh, I have seen that style before„. It just sucks. You feel as if you did nothing, just copy.
My problem with this seems that I still have to find my style and work on it step by step. With this I try out a lot of things and in small steps I explore for myself what I really like in a photo. I knew from way before my ambitious time in photography that I liked back-shots. And it seems that even that won’t be recognized when the more famous photographers do it. Then they again will say „oh, a back-shot, didn’t so and so done that?“ „you like them back-shots, huh? So and so, as well„. I effing know. I kind of just want to cry out like a little teenage girl „I liked it waaaay earlier than the other one did!“. But I have to accept that as an artist who wants to get better you have to be compared to others, who ARE better. It just seems so unfair that own ideas won’t be recognized. It just sucks.
Furthermore, the well known photographers are not the inventor of all things. Inspiration comes from all things. You can just like the same stuff. It can happen. It just won’t be seen as that, if those two are too close together. I sometimes still struggle with all of this and question myself if I really like what I do. That is the worst part and nobody should get into that stadium. When you are questioning everything you like, you kind of are beginning to stop what you do and dislike your work. Stopping, thats the worst you could do. You should just keep going on. The comparisons will still be there, I guess. You could enlarge the distance to other photographers, even with small things, like changing themes of your blog or how you present your photos to the public eye. I don’t have the solution on everyones personal case, but the most important thing, in my opinion, is to keep on going. I experienced this myself by stopping for a bit and drowning in self-misery. It may be not as harsh as it sounds like, but I think I am not the only one who has self-doubt to some certain extend.
Ohyeah, writing about it helps as well. I like to put my thoughts onto the screen or paper, so I can put that and this thought on the side and move on. It is also a great tip for other problems as well. Well, I don’t want to beginn sounding like a author of selfhelp books. The thing you (and I) have to keep in mind is, that the comparisons will not stop, the critique will not stop and it is not beneficial at all to get distracted by all of this when you have fun doing what your are doing. It reminds me of a quote I heard some time ago: „It’s easier to steer a moving ship, than a ship who stands still„. I like those quotes. They are optimistic, dreamy and often very true.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Marocco, visited Casablanca, Rabat and Marrakesh. What I noticed in my behaviour is that I was very wary of my camera. You have to be that way, always. I think you can’t feel really safe anywhere you are, whether you are in your country or somewhere else. It can always happen that somebody sees your camera gear and wants to steal it. In an unknown country, however, I get very cautious and get a little paranoid, especially in not too touristy areas of the city, i.e. small streets, where the common people always tell you that this and that street are closed and I had to go the other way (yes, that happened). It is a kind of paranoid time, where you think you definately get mobbed. The same happened in Thailand, where a taxi brought me off the main street and stopped at a remote place for a few minutes. Besides having my gear stolen I thought I get physically hurt. Anyway, that’s another story 😀
In Marocco it’s even more weird having a camera out, because I was there with my girlfriend and that means that a lot of men will be looking at us. This is a common way of living there. Every woman outside of Marocco are seen as exotic. So we where looked at and so my camera, which I often put away, so it would not be so noteworthy to others.
This all can be my own fear of having things stolen or the actual case of real danger. Nothing happend, thank god (or other imaginary creatures). In Marocco I mostly took photos of the street, no asking strangers to pose or something like that. I’ve read a lot about the conservative nature of the people. They do not want to get photographed as easily as european people maybe and especially not in their religious surroundings. I kinda needed to learn that with this research and I did not try to offend them in any way. One small story was in the mosque Hassan II, the second biggest mosque in the world. There are only muslim men allowed in. If you saw my photo on my About Me page you can see that I do not exactly look muslim like the other maroccan people. In fact, I am muslim, on paper anyways. And I really wanted to get into the mosque! First I tried to get in with the dslr, but of course they would not let me. Then I just walked in (after some discussion with one guy if I am muslim or not…) with an iPhone in my pocket. Inside I did not want to take pictures right away, rather wait until everybody prays and then take them. I could not imagine how they would behave if I just went in to take photos after I told them I could pray (which I can’t, not in the proper way anyway). After a few minutes sitting down at the end of the hallway I saw another young guy grabbing his phone and taking photos. I observed him a little, the others as well. The other men were not even praying, they talked or just lay down and cooled off from the hot sun. So I felt a little more comfortable to take photos as well. I still could not walk as freely as I wanted to, so they were just snapshots to hold the visit in my memory.
After some time I thought that I could not possibly stay there for too long, so I went out with a bit of a rushing heartbeat. I did it 😀 This was one of the experiences I had with the more religious side of things in Marocco. It was nothing compared to Thailand, where it is so normal to take photos inside the temples. The reason may well be the amount of tourists and the culture to nourish them. Marocco is not up to this standard and that is good. With this it will stay not too touristy and still a little more dangerous to take photographs, I guess. In any case, if you just be discrete, don’t offend people, then it should be alright – just like any other place in the world.
Now I’ve posted almost everything I wanted to post about my month in Thailand. It was a blast, I must say! I really would like to go there again, travel to the nearby countries and discover a lot more. The question is: When? I really don’t know…I never was really outside of my comfort zone as much as in Thailand, being there on my own and trying to get by. Now I know I can handle it. To sum up the photography aspect of the journey: I think there is so much so discover still. I only saw small waterfalls unfortunately and I did not see too much of the non-touristy places. While being in these tourist populated cities, I still could capture a lot of great landscapes and street life. I am glad that I could combine a lot of fun (i.e. parties) and traditional activities (i.e. temples, discovering new corners of cities).
For now this is all about Thailand. Here are the the final photos of my trip back to Germany. I hope you like them as well! Plus, feel free to connect via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter 🙂
I finally arrived at the beaches, the beautiful sunsets, the parties, the fun. Everything was true what others told me about the islands. It was, indeed, very beautiful throughout. Ok, maybe not every beach was so clean as I wished it to be, but better than any beach I ever was. In truth, I am not the beach person, so I did not partake in much water activities, but I tried to capture the beauty of it. There is one big viewpoint in Koh Phi Phi, where everybody goes to see the sunset. It was very nice, indeed. The bad part was that the sun was behind big palm trees, so you only could see the colours, which were beautiful on their own. There was one other night, however, where I just went to the beach to see the sunset and it was the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. This is the one I will remember for a long time.
Another great thing was the fireshows at the beaches. There I took some really great photos in my opinion. I hope you like them as well 🙂
Koh Phi Phi was mostly enjoying some party and some beaches, so I did not take as much different photos. In Koh Lanta there was rarely anything to do and not too much was interesting enough to photograph. I was at a national park there with some monkeys, but there I only almost got bit while I tried to take some photographs of them. The sound of the camera was to distracting for them I think 😀
Plus, it was almost the end of my journey, so I did not focus as much on photography and just relaxed. Nevertheless, there were some cool shots and I hope you like them!
Chiang Mai was awesome, I really liked it there. It had a good vibe, it was not too big, not too small, a nice town to stay for a couple of days. However, I wanted to see something else in my month in Thailand. So I decided to stay a little in Chiang Rai, way up north of Thailand. From friends I heard a lot of good things about it and I was really excited to go to some nice viewpoints. This, however, did not happen. I could not get to the best place to be: Phu Chi Fa. For getting there I needed to drive four hours on a dangerous road, which I could not handle. That’s what the people told me. Just google the place, it seemed like the best viewpoint in the whole of Thailand. Bummer.
Arriving at Chiang Rai was also not that great. It felt like a too small place with a bad vibe. I do not know why, but I immediately had a bad feeling about it.
This is why I did not do sooo much in Chiang Rai. I stayed there for two nights and that was it. In this time I still did a little: The White Temple, The Black House and the Long Neck Tribe. These are some impressions of it. I hope you like them! Feel free to connect via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram! 🙂
Soo…what I did: I imported everything from khitostrol.wordpress.com into my main blog. Why? Because it seemed that everything that I did while being on the other site got directed into my writing blog, where I really did not do much in the last months and won’t in the next.
I know, it is a rather sudden to change everything, but I think the three followers can handle it 😀
Let’s see if this works out. If not, I will change it again or stick to this forever.
Chiang Mai, one of the cities I spend the most time in. First there was the overnight train from Ayutthaya and then a lot of temples. At one of the temples, the Doi Suthep, there were some kids wearing traditional clothes. This was of course a nice motive. The Problem however is that they were there for a reason: Tourism. The always wanted money in exchange for a photo. It is sad to see them only standing there and smiling only for that reason. I did take a shot without knowing this, but it’s just not genuine. I did not like it as much. I will just show another shot I took, where they were chilling on the steps to the temple. I felt this was more interesting than a fake smile.
In Chiang Mai I strolled around a lot and found a great hotel, where you had to go through a nice hallway with pictures on the walls. It was a bit curved, which build nice lines. Another nice place was the Wat Chedi Luang, which was one of the most beautiful temples I’ve seen in Thailand. There were also monks who sang a song and hummed. It was really great to experience this.
I hope you like the photos! Feel free to contact me via Twitter or visit my facebook page 🙂
KHITOS 