Here's an interesting video about Danish bicycling. Though for some of you it might be like watching flying saucers for the first time. Especially those of you who are considering to get a Suzuki car in the US with free gasoline card!
The video is from Andreas and tell me if you think it's true what an american once told me, that our Danish language "sound like throat cancer" ..?
For more info on the bicycle, see http://www.larryvsharry.com you can get a Clockwork model, a Bullit, a Bluebird '71 and three other fine models. Weight 20 kilos.
Normally when I don’t have something good to say about someone or something, I rather don’t say anything.
Today I will make an exception because it might be an interesting experiment. Not so much from a photographer’s viewpoint as from a citizen’s viewpoint.
Recently I did an article for a Danish magazine with photos, featuring Danish designer Mette Bjerregaard.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to make much sense of it if I posted it here. But visiting an art gallery today, where the owner oddly enough had read the article and found the message very personal, I felt obliged to convey a bit of the article anyways.
It deals with the dilemma that we strive to become ourselves and experience happiness or fulfillment, yet we feel we were born the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting and long read about the business of shooting celebrities. It's a tale of lawyers, journalists, immigrants and family members who have fallen to the lowest levels in order to make money on celebrities.
No doubt they are proud of them self and their success in terms of numbers. They brag. It's like when the porn stars meet up for their yearly award show, the same proudness of being amongst the best of the lowest.
And they all prefer to conceal their real names in their pursuit of disclosing the every move of celebrities ... which is odd but at least gives you a hint that they know, somewhere down deep, they're not on a path their mom and dad would concur with.
As some of you know, I don't own a television, for reasons of aesthetics, time and crappy lightning - amongst other reasons. But I can see it on my laptop if I wish to, and the other day I saw this X-Factor which is the Danish American Idol thing that I have seen hyped so much.
This guy, Martin, is a real Justin Timberlake or something in the making. What a natural talent, and only 15 years! Innocence doesn't come cleaner than this:
If you have the stomach, Danish photographer Jan Grarup has a somewhat different MySpace page with extensive galleries from his travels to Darfur, Congo, Rawanda and other troubled areas of the world.
I've never seen so many of his pictures in context and there's some real tough ones in those series.
It doesn't make sense how things are. Yet, when things are good it's because somebody works on making them good. When a country or people are doing really bad don't think it's something that just happen due to the weather or by itself. It's created by someone who doesn't want that society to do well.
Interesting, isn't it? What you can do with digital publishing and the internet, I mean; compared to old fashioned publishing, print and distribution.
A download every 40 minutes of my "Twenty Portraits of 2007" free eBook is a larger 'sale' than most traditional photo books. Because it's digital and because it's free.
The thing I like the best it not having to deal with slow publishing houses trying to decide if they want to publish or not.
I just saw The Dead Girl and it's not a uplifting story. Yet the photographing by Michael Grady is in a class of it's own and the story is a bit in the style of Crash.
[I might add photos later when the Uber.com tech guys get it to work again]
Until few days ago I had my good old 20" Mac that was my stable color screen. Whatever happened on laptops and other computers, I could always trust the colors on that screen.
I've just sent out my January 2008 Newsletter with a link to my new 40 page free eBook "Twenty Portraits of 2007" where I've selected 20 portraits.
You may have seen some of them here, but feel free to download [2.3 MB] it anyway and comment what you think. Click on the picture or the download link.
If you click on the image above you can see a slideshow I did from Europe's largest digital book printing facility. Also, I blogged about this earlier in "FACTORY GIRL".
I've known about this little goodie for a few days. It's the TIME's "The year in images" which I think has a few good shots with some of the Leica qualities suchs as being aesthetic, close to events and with a 'history' touch to them, already when they were shot. It's a style.
This is a remarkable shot. You will have a hard time teaching a photography class how to do one like this. Because there's really nothing to it. Yet it is a great shot which I've thought about many times since I saw it a week ago. Maybe because it is so personal.
Today it's three years ago the tsunami hit South East Asia. Let me state in the first lines here that I don't ancourage people to indulge in sorrow or regret over things that have happened.
It's not a post about lighting candlelights and sit around and cry about stuff.
Also, I'm not a fan of the way photographers and the press cover catastrophes. They happen to be good business for the media why "professionally" they love them, but as humans, they of course "feel for the victims."
Thus we get this weird duo-pole business of "one year after," "five years after," "ten year after" media coverages of September 11, tsunamis, hurricanes, bombs, wars and stuff.
Gee, I don't know what to think of this. In some sense I find her work disappointing. But also fascinating. I really can't work out what I think. Maybe I think it looks too fake for my taste.
Here is what I was looking at. But I was also thinking about the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes shooting in Vanity Fair. It was five days work on site. The queen was 11 weeks of preparation and 11 assistants. And one (lousy) dSLR camra that is not even a Leica. I had expected a Hasselblad.
Anyhow, these are the four pictures released or approved by HRH Queen Elizabeth II:
I guess some of you know about this, because nearly 8 million YouTube users have seen is so far. But hey, it's new to me. And I think this is the coolest project I've seen in "social sharing" on the internet.
This guy Noah took a self portrait each day for six years and put it together as a video. From about 45 seconds in it I think it becomes mesmerising and magic to look at it. His hair, it's like he's flying through time.
Around 3 minutes in I think you can see from his face expression how he's sliding down life's razorblade.
You can't help but thinking, what if he became muslim suddenly and grew a beard. Or what about kids, where do they fit into the picture. Also, I feel an urge to pause the video to check his girlfriend, his computer in the background and stuff. So it turns out the Simpsons thought about that too and made this.
I like the original and I guess lots more of people will see it now that it's ben aprt of the Simpsons.
Just before I went skiing in Norway I had a couple of busy days trying to get all ends to fit together. On Thursday I photographed Her Royal Highness Princess Mary of Denmark in the morning and then went straight to Copenhagen to shoot the largest digital printing facility, I guess, in Europe.
The client had warned me it might very well take two days, but little did he know about what my wife would do to me if I didn’t return back in time to participate in the Christmas party in my youngest daughters kindergarten.
Going new ways sometimes bring about new inspiration and new realizations. One such new way could be listening to this great 24H radio station, Concord Radio, I found which plays classical, jazz, rock, pop, R&B, latin ... or (hold on to your socks!)... "Stax Favorites"
Note: I've added a slideshow to this. See link in the bottom.
In the week that just passed we had election night here in Denmark. The Prime Minister called the election just three weeks prior why it was quite a speedy election.
Anyways, Tuesday night November 13, I was in Copenhagen and arrived rather early to the Christiansborg Castle which is the home of the parliament, most of the ministries and the Member of Parliament’s offices.
(You’ll never guess what that MAD means. So I’ll tell you in the middle of this post)
A month ago I met professor Hans Blix at the Faroe Islands where he was speaking with president Bill Clinton. Now, I'm reading his book "Disarming Iraq"
Hans Blix was the UN weapons inspector in Iraq till he was pulled out when George Bush, Tony Blair of UK and Jose Maria Aznar Lopez of Spain decided to go to war without consensus by the UN. Dirty story. Basically they avoided UN to vote about it, as they knew it would not pass through. So they just decided to use the UN resolution 1441 which said that Iraq had to corporate with the weapons inspectors. So they just said, “we’re not satisfied with the way Iraq corporate, which mean we can move to next level.”
The UN resolution 1441 basically said “corporate or face severe consequences” which meant “corporate or we will have to reevaluate,” but for the sake of their interests Blair, Bush and Aznar Lopez said it meant “corporate or war.”
I remember some years ago I met a guy from Miami who had been on cocaine for a period. He told me, it was the only drug he wanted to do. He was an ad exec and made loads of money but wanted somehow to get higher, in some spiritual sense.
To begin with cocaine worked for him, and he didn't consider himself a drug addict at all. But within a year it just started to ruin his life. He didn't see it first as he was elsewhere: He tought things was great and he was just talking and talking and felt wise as hell. As people on cocaine do.
Till he started getting nightmares in in clear daytime if he didn't get his cocaine. Which then escalated to a point where even he was fully drugged at all times, yet he had nightmares and couldn't escape.
What a damn trap! Anyway, he got off and he even gave me his Narocon Anniversary t-shirt which was a really nice t-shirt in 70-ties design (red with yellow text on front) I wanted to frame and hang on my wall.
Anyways, in UK I saw something that might communicate that guys story better than me having a framed t-shirt on my wall:
That's one of four videos that so far has been made by http://www.drugfreeworld.org
Get your Kleenex' ready and sit your kids and friends in front of the screen. This is important. Drugs does not make anyone happy, creative or free.
Drugs are a trap. I know several fashion photographers who's career went down the drain with cocaine. Some of them still take pictures and think they are the best in the world. But they are alone in thinking so but anyways live in their own world where they don't notice that the big hot magazines that used to call doesn't call them anymore. Drugs really destroy creativity in a way not even good old Soviet union was able to.
If your go to their website http://www.drugfreeworld.org you can digg it and also post the videos to your Facebook.com profile with one click.
It has been, i confess, long overdue. But i have been procrastinating this simple task of leaving you a comment for weeks. I've been busy and only comment when commented. I do admire your work and your blogs are quite the read. congratulations on a wonderful page. And. xoxoxox :)
