Beyond the obvious

Flamenco is full of passion and fire. When these dancers tap out there vibrant rhythms the floor shakes. As you watch your heart beats faster, your temperature rises and energy courses through your veins. The dancers work incredibly hard. You'll see that in the images. We were fortunate enough to photograph an advanced dance class at one of the world's best Flamenco schools. Please take a moment to view the selected images from my photo-story . When the image opens you can click the i to see the accompanying text. Here are most of the same images on Flickr too. For those interested in the technical side, I used one flash, bounced on the white walls and 'dragged' the shutter to achieve a balance with the ambient light (which was mainly terrible overhead florescent). It was a real challenge. For the most part I used a 50mm lens. The wider shots were done with the 17-40mm on my Canon 5D. I did not use burst mode. It's too random and you miss vital moments - far...

Therese in front of her souvenier shop in Bruges. She has been there for almost 50 years. Nothing much changed in her shop in all that time. This year she is retiring. I've been thinking about writing this blog for quite some time now. It's not easy. I could take a critical line like I did in my blog post about the photographs I hate looking at (and why) but instead I decided on a more positive approach, so this post is in praise of all those photographers who respect and celebrate the relationship photography has with reality, truth and photographic 'seeing'. Arguably the real value and power of photography is in showing the world as we actually see it. Photojournalism has a strict code of ethics forbidding altering an image substantially. This has to be adhered to because if it were not then a photojournalist's images would be worthless. Likewise individuals taking family snapshots, or local photographers recording daily life as we see it make images that b...

The saturation slider test (click to open large version) I've devised a fun self help test for photographers. Where do you put your saturation slider. By the way Dictionary.com defines kitsch as "something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste." This post is intended to be a playful jibe, humorous and I know that I've definitely pushed my saturation slider too far to the right (and left) in the past LOL. Till soon, Paul Web-site  www.indigo2photography.co.uk ******************************************************* Twitter:  paul_indigo Facebook:  Paul Indigo Facebook Page:  www.facebook.com/paul.indigo Google+:  Paul Indigo Flickr:  paulindigo

When you see a picture you generally either like it or it does nothing for you. Images evoke an instant emotional reaction in the viewer before we start analysing the content. When I look at many of the images uploaded on social image sharing websites and see that they have pages of comments and heaps of praise I often wonder what it is in the image people are responding too. Many of the shots are technically poor, the content is of little interest (to me) – so I wonder… Then there are other images that, if you really look and ‘read’ the image, have many wonderful elements, but they appear to be passed up by the mass audience. Highly manipulated arty photos, pictures of pretty girls and the usual visual clichés seem to do much better than photojournalistic images that show the human condition. It’s interesting that audiences are attracted to arty pictures with added textures, HDR and hyped colours. On the other hand, when it comes to wanting to see a news image, the same audien...