If that’s their wish, is fine to remove those live footage from a weddings fair in Bucharest, however I think I should also delete all the photos with artists under contract with RBA Dragon, if RBA Dragon does not wants his artist advertised, known and with better chance to find contracts in the future, who am I to do something against that? The country is full of such other artists…
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I often see Romanians priding of our country because the women are beautiful here. I really don’t see why I would pride with that, if Geta from Floor 3 is gorgeous, that does not make me better, smarter of more handsome. Even if I somehow get to bang her, that does not make me better, smarter of more handsome. Maybe just lucky for that particular time and space.
I am also highly unsure about this claim, about the Romanian women being that beautiful… I saw a lot of them being ugly or average. Maybe the percentage of above-average ones is a bit over some other countries, but (and I speak now from a photographer perspective) the percentage of top-of-the line, breath-taking, knocking-you-off, stunning beauties is not something I find impressive.
However, I just stumbled on a site with an top 15 of countries with the hottest women and Romania is listed among those. I’m not sure if I should dismiss this for listing Andreea Răducan as the country’s highlight or for including USA and UK in the top. I just note one of the criteria for inclusion in the top “the girls are said to love American men” (American men, is not you but your money.
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Yesterday, 22 December 2009 it was the 20 years anniversary of what we like to call the “revolution”, the fall of the communist dictatorship in Romania, which was violent: over 1000 people died, some fighting for freedom, some on duty, some by accident and some due to stupidity.
The celebration was lame and uneventful, proving once again we are ready to easily trade the freedom for a bit or promised “tranquillity”: a solemn session on the parliament where nobody was interested (they have those every year), some documentaries and talk shows on TV and that was about all.
Passing trough the city center, I noticed something that fired my interest: in the passage below Piața Universității (the square where many people died – tanks, guns – it much worse than Tienanmen) they had a photo gallery, open for all the people walking: photos from the last days of the dictatorship, from the revolution days and from the aftermath.
On one hand, I was jealous as a photographer, those are times when you can capture the reality and even a snapshot can become “gold” from an artistic point of view. On the other hand, people died and you don’t want people to die only to have subjects for your photos.
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One of the concerts I saw at Bucharest Days was “Balade din Carpati” (“Carpathian Ballads”) by K1 and Felicia Filip: not sure what was their target with such an interesting combination of modern, classic and traditional music, maybe they wanted to cash in on the Nightwish success, maybe they were awed by Therion or something else… the point is: it was interesting but to use a well known expression: “close, but no cigar”.
First of all, I should acknowledge the sound system in the street was total crap (it was crap also a night before when Mircea Baniciu performed together with Vladi Cnejevici, and that was folk music, where everyone knew the songs), so the experience was far from optimal.
First of all, the K1 band cannot hide its roots in a boy bad: they sing, move and dace like a boy band and this is ….bleah. They were the lowest point of the show, their dance stuff destroy all the symphonic metal stuff.
Then the “story teller”, Vlad Radescu, he can’t hold a candle to Christopher Lee in Symphony of Enchanted Lands II by Rhapsody of Fire. But, honestly, who can hold a candle to Saruman? He do not even tried: no cavernous voice, no magic, no nothing. I do not care about the joyful voice of a bald guy.
Felicia Filip did her best, she is a great soprano with an amazing voice, no complaint about her.
What I think was the highlight of the show was Cornelia Tihon, she is really great with the Pan flute (and other woodwind instruments, like regular flute or tulnic, she also has some extraordinary legs and is not afraid to show them on stage.
I will hold a final conclusion until I hear a show in better acoustic conditions (YouTube is full of recorded clips from various concerts, do a search and apply your own judgement), but my initial bias is not very positive, I was disappointed.
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After the big pop star Madonna was booed at a concert in Bucharest for giving an uniformed lecture about gipsies. Of course that created a cascade of equally uninformed reactions in the media all over the world and a storm of comments. But like any storms, it came and went away, people forgot about it.
Well, last week-end at ONGFest, the national festival for non-governmental organizations was a good opportunity for me to remember the Madonna incident: the most acclaimed artistic moment at the event (at least from what I have seen) was created by a gypsy organization, they danced, sang and people loved them. Yes, the same people who would have booed Madonna.
What’s the trick? They were bathed, wearing clean clothes, smelled good, had jobs, acted like people who attended school and their music was authentic, not manele. Is that too demanding?
Anyway, I enjoyed the moment and took a lot of photos.
At the end of their show, they started a “penguin dance” and everybody joined them. Is that racism? discrimination?
With this being said, I will reiterate: I have no sympathy for the smelly and dirty ones who refuse to get a job and instead send their children to beg and steal for them, milk the social security and use the school only as a source of food (the “corn cu lapte” program).
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![[Y!M]](https://nicubunu.ro/cartoon/me-and-ym.png)
In a large effort taking a few weeks I had to repair the missing images on this photoblog
after the massive data loss caused by the yahoo bastard. A few photos were lost for good, but the majority of content is restored properly.
Now I can focus on finding an alternate gallery solution (self hosted, I won’t trust something else after getting burned) and taking more photos.
Eat my dust Yahoo… I said it before and will say it again: I hope you get cancer and die. You deserve it.
Even if for the moment I don’t have a place to host my photos (the long process of repairing this blog is ongoing, will take some more days) I still shoot when I get the opportunity, hoping will post when everything is settled.
So when I saw the big media splash about the Tuborg event held with free entrance in the Izvor Park, I figured it may be a good opportunity for some photos, even if I was not interested much in the music or their beer (like 10 years ago it was probably my beer of choice, now it tastes like the recipe was changed for the worse).
At the entrance a big poster informed you are not allowed with professional photo/video cameras, with food or drinks brought from outside, not even with you own plastic glasses. And a number of agents performing body searches, to ensure you don’t have any of those on you.
Seeing that, my first reaction was to turn back and leave, but I though there is no harm in trying and approached the gate. I guy said: go there, the guy with black sunglasses will look at your camera and decide. OK, trip to the guy with sunglasses, who looked at my entry-level DLSR with zoom lenses mounted and decided: “this is semi-pro, you can’t go in”.
No point in arguing about what is “pro” and “semi-pro” or that the poster said only “pro”, there are a lot of other things to shoot.
And what about beers? My current favorites are imported Czech beers, the Tuborg products are like that: Skol – poor and cheap, a lot of alternatives in this area; Tuborg – worse than it used to be, you can get better at the same price; Carlsberg – this one is passable. Too bad they also the importer for Guinness, the other ones are not missed…
For an unknown reason (I can only suspect my criticism for their deal with Microsoft) the guys at Yahoo deleted my flickr account. At first, I thought it was not such a big deal, since I was looking for an alternative anyway (I like flickr as a gallery but I don’t want to deal with Microsoft) and right after the account deletion the photos embedded in various web pages were still visible.
A few days later, those are gone… this photoblog is ruined, my other (main) blog has a few broken articles, a number of pages which used my photos under the CC-BY-SA license are broken as well.
For this blog, I probably have to dig into the photo archive, put the files on my static site and repair about 200 posts. A big and ugly work. For 3-rd party sites, I can’t to anything, as I have no idea who and how used the photos (that’s the reason of freedom).
Lesson learned: do not rely on external services for critical applications (ups! this blog is hosted also on a 3-rd party service, hopefully a more trustworthy one).
Yahoo, I hope you get cancer and die. You deserve it.
In fact there is no part one… Part one was about a year ago when I posted on my main blog a photo made with my phone while going home, back from work, in the public transportation system in Bucharest. It was nothing special, made with the phone hels in the normal position for use wile texting for example and showing nothing more than could be recorded by the surveillance camera.
Still, it generated the most heated debate ever on my blog (I still receive now comments on it), with people attacking or defending me. Some even tried to Google bomb me, trying to make me to take down the page. This simply won’t happen! But in a funny(ironic?) twist, those guys are still one of the main traffic sources on the blog 😀 (and indirectly ads click, which probably made me something in the range of 20$).
This controversy was one of my main reasons to start a separate blog dedicated to photography, where I published a lot of stuff, even more revealing, and the reactions were completely different (maybe because here the audience has less pompous *******?)
But Wow! what a long introduction! And for what? A couple of days ago, returning from work to home, the same public transportation system and having with me the same crappy camera phone I got the opportunity for a similar shot. Going full-circle.
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So far the image hosting on this blog was provided by flickr which I still consider from a technical point of view the best gallery software available. But with the recent deal about the Yahoo and Microsoft partnership and my solid stance to not give any money to the evil empire at Microsoft (either directly or indirectly), I will take a break from posting any new photo on flickr and think about the possible way forward.
As an unfortunate consequence, wile I am not sure about the hosting solution I will have to take a break from blogging photos too. It may take a while, the deal was expected for quite a while and for a long time I searched for a replacement with no success.
Following one of my graphic tutorials I got a request from one (supposedly) US girl: she say she lost the originals of some photos and need some help to recover a few who were watermarked by a hosting site.
I decided to not investigate further her identity and motivation and since the images are small and blurry anyway, I tried a bit of fixing with GIMP, nothing fancy, just a few minutes with the clone, shear and maybe the healing tool.
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Now being on different continents, I am a bit disappointed I cannot ask her in exchange to work for me as a model in a photo session, I am really look for models at this moment.
I don’t print photos, almost everything I did so far with photography far was for online use only, do I don’t own (and don’t plan to buy) a photo printer. But exceptionally, for a small project, I needed some prints (about 50 photos), so went to the nearest shop (like 5 minutes from my office) with the photos on an USB stick.
Much to my disappointment I was told: “sorry, our USB reader does not work, come again next week”. FTW? Waste a CD for that? I don’t feel like doing that… And I learned from my co-workers this happen often. How hard is to have a working USB port on the computer? Or maybe I got to talk with the stupidest guy on the planet?
Conclusion: if you live in Bucharest, try to avoid Nic Classic if you have something to print.
Life is not a pony farm and our own stupidity is our worst enemy. The hard drive on my desktop has limited space available so I am using an external drive for storage (I know I am stupid for not having an additional backup, but that’s another story): usually the photos are downloaded from the camera to the desktop, sorted, selected, a few resized and published and after a while I copy them on the external drive and delete from the desktop, to make room for the next batch.
All good until yesterday when trying to make a selection from my old works I discovered almost everything shot in May this year is nowhere to be found. It looks like I made a mistake and deleted before making the copy. I am that stupid at times.
Here are some highlights of the lost files:
Update: That wasn’t all, the curse continued after the yahoo bastards deleted my account and the files were lost for good.
Massive bummer, right?
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At Ziua Mamelor de Inger I found interesting to observe how the photographers were pouncing over "cute" subjects (kids playing), just like vultures over their prey.
But I am a vulture too: I stumbled upon some people crying and hugging and my first reaction (old habit?) was tu torn away and give them some privacy. But then I went like: WTF! I am a photographer! I can’t leave the decisive moment pass… if they want privacy they shouldn’t do this in public, at an event where media is invited…
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In some previous posts I talked about a photography course I took, now that it ended is the time for a review (frankly, the time was a couple of weeks ago but being lazybusy, only now I managed to sit down and write something): back when I registered for it, very little information was available on the net about it beside the official site.
In very few words, I can say the course was within my expectations, but this does not tell much, it may tell something about my ability to set my expectation level or to perceive value, so there is a clear need for more words… At 6 weekends, the course is short, you will learn some stuff but also will feel the need to continue learning on your own, do not expect to walk in a total noob and walk out Cartier-Bresson.
Regarding theory, if you read a good photography book and/or a couple of websites, the course will add very little, but I found more important the opportunity the practical experience of a real studio and working in a real studio, as well as the interaction with other photographers: both the Marius and Vlad, the teachers and your fellow colleagues (about a dozen of classmates).
In a very conventional style I will try to outline what was, from my subjective point of view, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good: for me, the best part was the open atmosphere, it was pretty much like an open conversation where you didn’t feel afraid to contradict the teachers at times and also felt your opinion matters. You are treated like an equal.
The bad: the "Photoshop" class was a wasted day, I could not care less about what are the shortcuts in some proprietary Adobe software or how awesome some people think are the plug-ins from Alien Skin. But I expected that, too bad that I didn’t have ready a “each time you pirateillegally download an expensive proprietary graphic editor and your job would be accomplished fine with a Free alternative, God kills a kitten".
The ugly: the course has an online presence, a discussion group on Yahoo and also a very inactive and less populated flickr group, you can easily see a lack of experience about online communities. In fact the entire "community" part is lacking, most likely I won’t get it touch with the colleagues.
As a conclusion, I find it a positive experience at a right price (for me it was an impulse buy, finding the news about it when I was browsing an online photo gear store, but I am odd with money spending and priorities), so if you can afford, go for it.
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