tobias m. schiel
The current Lens Artists Challenge is perfect pairs (or diptychs), and reading this prompt immediately reinded me I always wanted to pair these two. They were taken in 2023 but I never really got around to continuing this series with things I see in museums. So this was a very welcome reminder.
An entry for this week’s lens artists challenge #304: Behind. The challenge is about backgrounds, and so is this picture – in a less literal sense, too.
Initially, I only wanted to make a picture of a bench, a tree and the old man on a hill, in silhouette. Then I saw the potential for a short narrative – with a very similar, epic story by Christophe Chabouté, The Park Bench, at the back of my mind. So this is also a homage to one of my favorite graphic novels.
Continue reading “A Bench”
Lens-Artists Challenge #298: To Be Young Again
Like “Lovely Rita” a couple of weeks ago, this one is based on a Beatles song. Though I am not a big fan of their music in general, I think the “Sgt. Peppers“ album is a work of genius, and I always wanted to do a series of pictures based on the entire selection of songs it features. One day… For now, here’s an entry for the Lens-Artists Challenge # 297: Music to My Eyes.
Another entry for the lens-artists challenge: Of the many composition factors in photography, this challenge focuses on shape, form, texture, and light – and I think those are exactly the means I used in this photo.
I was making these pictures for this year’s Bingo Challenge over at the Toy Photographers blog – the cue is ‘secret’ – when the Lens Artist’s ‘sound’ challenge popped up. Having posted so many sound-related pictures last year, I thought I’d go with the whispered words, the hushed voices a secret requires.
The first picture shows the original idea, the second resulted from trying the same in a more noir style.
“What have we got?” – “One dead joke, sir. GSW to the punch line. Timing seems a bit off, don’t you think?”
An entry for this month’s toy photography challenge: dad jokes. And since the picture is also a bit dramatic, this might also be a fitting entry for this week’s lens-artists challenge.
The bus might eventually come. I believe it will, and we will be off to new adventures. Happy New Year!
“Take my Harlem Air Shaft. So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbors’ laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing, that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast. One guy is cooking dried fish and rice and another guy’s got a great big turkey. Guy-with-fish’s wife is a terrific cooker but the guy’s wife with the turkey is doing a sad job. You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. Jitterbugs are jumping up and down always over you, never below you. That’s a funny thing about jitterbugs. They’re always above you. I tried to put all that in Harlem Air Shaft.” (Duke Ellington in Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya. The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, ed. by Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff. New York, 1966)
This picture was inspired by the Duke’s description of a Harlem air shaft (his inspiration). I practically saw the picture in front of me when I read the above lines. It took a while to build this, but here we go … I am so lucky there’s the last chance challenge with the lens-artists.
When I photographed the Jazz series last year, I felt I should also include some pictures of the band playing on a small stage, in a jazz club rather than a ballroom or a concert hall. However, I never really felt like building the diorama I needed.
While I was making some other pictures however, the frustration about what felt like I was missing out got so strong that I finally I built this 1/87 scale model of a club I remember from 40 years ago … vaguely. Welcome to the Downtown!
Continue reading “Let Me Off Uptown”
One of several possible entries for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #267: Recharge.
LAPC #265: Black and White or Monochrome | Black and white is a preferred choice when I photograph miniature toys. It seems to add another layer of abstraction to pictures which already show abstract depictions of reality – these toys and models have to be abstract due to their size (and my building skills). I feel that the additional layer of abstraction sort of distracts from the fact that we are dealing with tiny plastic toys, but I still cannot grasp why I would think so.
As for the procedure, I firmly believe that shooting color and only creating a black and white picture in editing is not the best way to go at it. A black and white picture is not simply a ‘normal’ picture minus the color. I feel that we pay more attention to light, develop a keener eye for slight nuances as well as stark contrasts in brightness when we are not distracted by colors, and can’t rely on contrasting colors. But maybe that’s just me.
Framing Your Photos is a wonderful challenge because there are two types of framimg I enjoy a lot. In my more or less abstract real life pictures, I love framing the void, or the spaces ‘in between’. For me that’s a way of exploring space and composition and the reality that provides the material for my pictures. I see these aspects in the pictures above.
Continue reading “Framing”
After posting an action figure sequence from 2021, here’s a brand new contribution for the lens-artists’ challenge telling a story. Showing K2-SO in the middle of an activity (enigmatic as it may be) implies that there was a ‘before’ and there will be an ‘after’ – a story.
When I photograph toys, it’s mostly with a story in mind. So when I learned the lens-artists’ challenge was about telling a story, I just had to go through my archives. Skimming through my toy stories, I found that this Spidey sequence (2021) is one of my favorites. It’s short, sweet and consistent; it invites interpretation, and it’s about things that mean a lot to me: Jazz, narratives, and dancing. Enjoy this throwback … and let the good times roll!
empire of lights 