Vernissage marathon by night

The EMOP or European Month of Photography did start this October. The chance to catch several exhibitions all over Berlin. I only have seen three of them so far but there were each pretty interesting.

Going to Brazil
Being relatively free in my schedule I could join a guided tour of the exhibition called The professor's Journeys - Six Expeditions Through Brazil In The 1930s with the curator. We were only four people, I was the youngest one, the pictures were in black and white and despite the photographer not being a professional the images were very clean and well composed.

Going back in time
Scanning the EMOP website it was difficult to keep in mind something as there are so many installations. But here and there images were catching my eyes, in particularly one from the Landesarchiv in Berlin and their exhibition Architecture on Glass - Photographs by Otto Hagemann. I decided to join the vernissage of this exhibition and to reach the place it felt like going to on an expedition. 

The Landesarchive are far far far away after the Tegel airport. I was basically cycling into the darkness for 12km. I arrived about 30min after the opening, just the time to listen to the last min of the opening speech. Opening speech declaimed in a lovely German administrative tone. It's not that it was in German, but you felt right away that you were not in a art gallery but in an official building, at the archive. 

Once again I was the youngest, the open bar was open and the pictures really interesting. I skip the photo-geek part, it was medium format images printed on glass plates and more important the images were beautiful. Architecture photography have this formal aspect that highlights the beauty in building as only good architecture photographers can do. Sometimes they succeed to go away from their purely archive duty thanks as well to the exhibition curator.

After the In the Off
Each serious festival should have an Off program as well.  So on my way back to civilization I stopped at the Wilmer Brauerei to attend another vernissage the same evening, this time the Monat Der Fotographie Off. 

Different location, typical Berlin style, semi abandoned industrial building with images every where or different sizes and formats. Different population as well. I keep in my minds the images of the desert in New Mexico and those specifically from the Very Large Array radio telescope in the middle of nowhere, probably because I have been there a few years ago and it still feels like images from another planet.

Less than a week left and a lof of photo exhibitions to catch!

Algo in mobile phone camera

Smartphones are becoming our primary camera and our primary way to consume images. The technical differences between those devices are shrinking. How do you differentiate between them?

Considering all devices coming with approximatively the same hardware from sensors to optic, the differences should come from the software. if you take Android OS, despite its presence on most of the smartphone, the manufacturers using this OS can still pre-load their devices with advanced options.

My point here is not to list or say which one is better than the other, but to highlight all the options now available. What I think is interesting here is to see what is considered to be granted from the user point of view: auto-focus, white balancing, hdr, face detection, low light condition, panorama and to wonder what people really understood of these tools. The marketing department surely has something to say about the last point.

To know a bit about the production workflow around this problematic, I really see the the battle of new algorithms/automatic image as the way for company to market their image (see the last Iphone campaign). A bit like the battle between film manufacturers (Kodak, Agfa, Fuji...) back in the days, where for the same ISO sensitivities (for me my favorite was 400 color by Fujifilm) the same color signal will appear slightly different on paper. The camera allows you to record the scene and the film/digital camera chosen will print the look of the final image.

So what can you really do? A lot will answer the emergency color scientist. It is super important and very interesting to study how our visual system is functioning, how it adapts with the light condition (eg. how to improve an image when observe on your phone in low light condition). All sounds pretty cool to me, color scientists can be useful.

La suite dans le futur.