Photography, in my opinion, has much to do with music. Everyone can hold a camera, in the same way that we all know how to sing “Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do” but the truth is not everyone can be Wagner, Chopin or Björk. The same applies to photography: We all can take pictures but there is a huge difference between the photos we take and those taken by pro-amateurs and professionals.

In the same way we listen to music without thinking who is behind it – a song becomes an individual object that lives per se – the same happens with a photo: We appreciate it, study it without thinking about who is behind it, in what circumstances the photo was taken, what moments preceded the immortality of a moment. With “Behind the Photo” I pretend to introduce to our readers who is behind a picture and try and put a photo into context.

The photo above is from Paulo Henriques, a young Portuguese photographer that I found on Twitter (and had the pleasure to meet in offline life recently). Paulo is a photojournalist with a track record that is none but impressive: He was a photographer and the photography editor for the music festival “Rock in Rio”, his work as been published in the book “Olhares de Pedra” (Sights of Stone) based on a photography work about statues in Portugal and has been collaborating as a freelancer with many Portuguese and international newspapers. He studied in Lisbon, Portugal and New York,U.S.A.

Interview

1. What is the story behind this picture?

PH: The story behind it is very simple: It was taken during a hearing at the Portuguese Parliament. These hearings taken a long time, where the guests are questioned by many members of the parliament and then have to answer to all those questions. Because of this the photographers have to stay there for many hours, waiting for the next guest. This particular photo was literally there, I just had to shoot with my camera: those are the legs and shoes of a fellow journalist that was also following the hearing. It was a detail that I liked and I am a photographer that likes the little details.

2. What equipment did you use to take this photo?

PH: I used a Canon EOS 1D Mark II that had a Canon 70-200mm IS II USM lenses on it, at the time.

3. Do you use photo retouching software? If yes, why?

PH: To make some editing I use Adobe Lightroom 2 and Adobe Photoshop CS4. I use Lightroom to manage my daily workflow as well as to make some basic adjustments like exposure, contrast, levels and density of some photos. For some jobs I have to make, where I’m asked something more specific, I usually go with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

4. What project do you consider more important, until now, in your career?

PH: This is really a difficult question since it is really complicated to choose only one project that I can consider more important, that has left a mark (in a positive or negative way). If I really have to choose, and because it is something that I worked on very recently, and in very difficult conditions, the work I did in Madeira, about the floods that affected the islands, will remain in my mind for a long time.

You can see more work by Paulo Henriques on his website as well follow him on Twitter.

I hope you like this new series and any comments, questions are more than welcome. That is why I spend  a gazillion Space Credits every week: to have that comment box ready for you

Franz Kafka described them as “an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul” and William Ewart Gladstone said “Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome“.

Books are always better than the movies that are made based upon them because, when you read a book, you build your own characters and you shape what you are reading to your own imagination.

Everyone has its classics when it comes to literature. Everyone has a book that turns to over and over again. Everyone has THAT book that always comes up when talking about books. Much like with music, those really into books can connect specific books to specific moments of their life. The following is a list of five books everyone should read in my opinion.

This post was inspired by a recent question that my fellow Rebel Clement made on Twitter. More than one list, it is a open door to my creative universe as well as an open invitation for you to share your own list, by leaving a comment.

1. “The Ultimate Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams: This is not a book, this is a master piece. Douglas Adams takes the science fiction genre to a whole new level by defying our own imagination. In this trilogy, that is made of four books , Douglas Adams takes us on a emotional roller coaster that makes us feel sympathy, hate and pure pity towards the numerous characters that he so carefully develops while laughing the all way through it. Characters include Marvin, the paranoid android and Arthur Dent a middle class British citizen that sees himself hitchhiking through the Universe . The beauty of this book is that when you think you can’t laugh any more, you turn the page and there you laugh even more. Warning: Can make you look like a mental case if read in public or with strangers around you. One more reason why you should read it.

Favorite quote: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

2. “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman: This is a fiction novel that opens the door to Albert Einstein’s dreams while he was working on his “Theory of Relativity” back in 1905. It consists of 30 short stories (dreams) and explore, with infinite grace and insight, different relations every one of us has with time. You know when you are waiting for someone that is late and time seems to pass so slowly? Or when you are having a great time and time goes by so fast? Alan Lightman, a physicist that works at the M.I.T., challenges its readers to explore the relations we have with time. Insightful and thought provoking.

Favourite Quote: “In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.”

3. “Neuromancer” by William Gibson: How to describe a book from someone that back in 1984 was already talking about cyberspace when cyberspace didn’t exist? William Gibson as always been ahead of his time and his novels are full of details of the future because that is where his mind lives. No matter in what decade you read them you will always be surprised by the fact that something that is referred to, in one of his many books, just happened 2 years ago. While some try to imagine the (near) future, William Gibson shapes it.

Favourite quote: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”

4. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa: I could write many things about this book and about Fernando Pessoa, to me one of the greatest writers of all times. I could but I could not really do him any justice. “The Book of Disquiet” was found after Pessoa’s death and is a mix of prose, small paragraphs and poems that contain all the creative brilliance of this man that was a copywriter (he was responsible for the Coca~Cola’s most famous slogan in Portugal) and a writer by devotion.

Favourite quote: “So it is with all life. A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I’ll have tomorrow for having felt regret today.”

5. “All families are psychotic” by Douglas Coupland: Few contemporary authors can describe U.S. society like Coupland. His style of writing, the attention to detail, the self criticism and a deep of knowledge of the big picture make Coupland a extremely effective narrator of the the story of the Drummond family on its travel from Vancouver to the Kennedy Space Center. What could be an uneventful trip to some, by the hand of Coupland its transformed into a novel that includes geriatric HIV, armed robbery, death in Walt Disney World, pharmaceutical drug lords, black market baby sales, suicide attempts and a letter stolen from Princess Diana’s casket from Prince William.

Favourite quote: “I keep thinking that if I look at my life long enough, there’ll be a sort of grand logic to it – a scheme. But I don’t think there is.”

What five books would you recommend? Let me know in the comments. Thank you!

Picture Credits: v.max1978 under a CC License

Some days ago my friend and co-conspirator Kieron James did a RT and by is “Amazing!!!!!” before the tweet I knew I had to check it out. What I saw was a video clip on YouTube what had me go like “WOW!!!!” and “WOW!!!!” again. The video by Tony Tooke was supported by a remix of Yoko Ono’s “The sun is Down” made by … Tony Tooke.

I had to investigate this further: I mean, the remix already sounded great but that the same artist had made a video to go with it that also looked great made me very curious. So I tweeted with Tony and told him I wanted to know more. We exchanged e-mails via DM (he had to start following me and I had to start following him) and I asked him what was this all about: A remix from a Yoko Ono’ song, a video… how had we come to that? (What was really bugging me was how come I had never heard of him?). I also found out that the remix was a part of a on-going remix competition and queried Tony about it all.

Tony’s reply was amazing for its simplicity:

The remix competition link is here . The competition is still open and making a video was not needed to enter. Because of the creative commons license I decided to do an animation just for fun. I had been through a creative block for a while and wanted to do something to get back into creating. I used the lyrics as inspiration for scenes in the video and the 3D objects where drawn in 2D in Xara Xtreme and converted to 3D in Bryce 6. I used editstudio 4, which was free with a computer magazine a few years ago, to mix the animations and add effects.

I like to work quickly when I get inspired and work through the night often as I find my mind is more focused.

What Tony failed to mention was that all of this was done in two weeks. You heard me, two weeks! Human nature doesn’t stop to surprise and to inspire me. I know how frustrating it is to have a creative block and all of us, that have a creative job have different ways to deal with it. What never occurred to me was to use that block as the driving force to create again. It is my pleasure to introduce you the to work of Tony Tooke:

Picture Credits: Stefanie Doll under a CC License

This is more of a serious matter than it appears on a first glance: freedom of speech issues are raised, can graffiti be considered art (the work of Bansky comes immediately to mind), not to mention that graffiti is used, not only in the US, by gangs to mark they territory.

But what if you could make graffiti that would be ephemeral, i.e., that would go away with a flick of the wrist? Now you can! Graffiti Research Lab has been testing this system for some time with spectacular results. Better still: Everyone now has access to the software (the Grafitti Research Lab team is a big advocate of the open source system). Either you are a code geek or just a regular user, G.R.L. has the thing just for you: the code for you to mess with and then compile or the plain and simple installer that you can put on your computer. (If you are a code geek you want to mess with it right now, right? Get it here for XCode 2.4 or greater)

What do you need to start playing around?

• A fast laptop that you can connect to an external monitor/television (dual video card)
• A video projector
• A web camera
• A green laser pen

If you have access to these all you have to do is to install the software, follow the instructions and you are ready to start tagging your room walls, your outside walls, trees around you, you name it.

Keep in mind two important things: The more powerful your video projector and your laser pen are the bigger the distance you can use your Laser Tag System. Most importantly if your laser pen is really that powerful you should NEVER point it to anyone’s face.

Download the Mac Installer or the Windows Installer.

You can see the first version of the Laser Tag System working on this video made by the G.R.L.

If you run into any troubles trying to make it work, Theodore Watson has a great how to right here. I would also ask to all of you to see what the Grafitti Research Lab is doing with their newest project The EyeWriter Initiative that is using technology to promote health reform in the U.S., bring awareness about ALS and help others. This is what technology should be used for.

What do you think? Are you giving this one a try? Let me know on the comments!

Jason just launched a new interactive game called “Evidence of Everything Exploding” featuring “NASA, Bill Gates, The Spanish Flu, Dadaism, James Joyce, Fidel Castro and other strange and wonderous evidence”. The critical sense of humor, the thought provoking videos, that you get to see every time you reach a new level, and all the graphic detail put into this new art work challenge the very concept of playing a game: Nelson’s games are not about how hard it is to reach the next level but the information you get while doing it.

You can play “Evidence of Everything Exploding” by clicking on this LINK. You can find also other works by Jason Nelson here including Game, Game, Game And Again Game and its sequel I made this. You play this. We are Enemies that are Nelson’s most famous works. They are both flash platform games that look like they are played inside someone’s stream of consciousness. They have been played over 8 million times combined. Game, Game Game won an Italian Art Award and received mentions on many gaming blogs as either genius or insanity in game form. The sequel was reviewed as an example of independent art game creation.