8/365 A Forest

…at the midpoint through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest…

There is something about forests that reminds me of human nature: growing, magical, deep, twisted, diverse, intricate, savage, sometimes dark, sometimes benevolent and welcoming, calm or full of whispers…and the list could go on forever. You get the point.
I often like to take small trips into such natural mazes, mostly for the serene feeling and the bit of disconnection from the daily rush of city life. I feel…safe and at home among the old trees.
Anyway, I will let you rest here while I try to manage the film projects I am working on. Don’t worry, the 365 project continues! 🙂

5/365

The fifth day of the 365 project started rather similar with the other one (more details, here), only this time we set off for guitar practice (Miruna is a very proficient guitar player and acts as my teacher 🙂 ).
After all the strumming and finger-numbing scales, we decided to take a break and maybe shoot a few portraits. I had only my camera and my 50mm lens and this is what we came up with.
It was rather silly, she was just playing around while she thought I was setting up my camera, so when I called for attention, she just gave me this look. I knew I had the shot, right away.
A summary? Make sure to always track what’s going around you, that photo you are looking for might not be the best thing out there and sometimes, hazard can really produce some neat results!

Rivers of Molten Gold (2/365)

The Sun sometimes must feel like Midas, gilding and then liquefying everything it touches.
I guess it’s somehow safe to say the family was simply enjoying the late afternoon on the lake. Maybe it’s my nostalgia or something, I don’t know.
But Autumn is a-coming in, right? Somehow autumn makes me all giddy and shooting happy. So, hopefully, more awesome images to come in the next few months.
What would you consider to be a Golden Moment? (The theme I had to execute for today).

The History of a “Click!”

I had a flash of light pass through the cells of my imagination: it was a day that called for a photograph; like a hungry wolf, it craved, crawled and howled for one. My fingers itched to feel the weight of the camera, the delicate balance of the perfectly aligned mirrors, lens and the breath of the aperture as it exhaled with each blink of the shutter curtains flicking and falling, stirring old dust and setting the calm lakes aflame with ripples. So I picked up my old partner in mischief and head into a vast hallway of unknown steps, marble corridors, hidden pathways, dusty trails, abandoned highways and thickets. Where my light (for it was mine, and nobody else’s) took me, it was impossible to tell since a viewfinder only offers a limited perception, one eye at a time. It was a scream of colors, shades, blackness and blinding light of the impending doom, wandering, weaving, brutally reflecting, smashing, bouncing, twisting and turning, diffracted or amplified as my eyes slowly flooded and the tears began to pour out: a silent storm of crevices, like a rain of bokeh and softness. And then…and THEN, like that rebellious particle that just couldn’t stay put and just HAD to move, bringing about the end of an endless era of stillness into the fulminating chaos of Creation, expanding tentacles of hot, ionized gases, consuming the perfect black of the astral sleep…just like that I…clicked! The camera began to heave as the pulleys shook their old laziness and began to lift (screeching in silent tongues of the Ancient Ones) the mirror, the curtains stirred dust (into the space where imagination, passion, hopes, dreams meet their catalyst, blending and morphing) and flashed open and with the trembling of the entire apparatus, the aperture opened with a microscopic twitch of the fatigued ballerina, the whole dark corridor trembling, shaking smothered in tension and suspense as the light began to flood every dark corner where the slightest touch of Evil might have ever hidden, crackling noise of the suicidal photons, rushing rapidly towards the very fibers of mind, depleting their collagen nature, tearing though tissue and bringing about the Lux Aeternam shining upon Bliss. The camera bled! It bleed for an endless eternity as I stared in wonder, my eyes blind and my mind fractured, my heart into pulsating struggle, my breath nowhere to be found but my feet unable to support and collapsing like old pillars of antique temples when the Ocean of Sensation gushes in, with the delicacy of a raging Tsunami. For you see, in my imprudence, in my impossibility to understand…but, then again, what human being could ever possibly understand? Do gods dream of this when it’s time for Uthenera?  Have I reached the primordial states of hot matter and disoriented particles clashing into a dance of Death that sprung Life?… …in my childish curiosity, I pointed the lens (with the finesse of the accomplished artist, as I wanted myself to think, to believe, cold, calculated, with the grace of a…cannon) towards the very incipient mixture of primordial wonders, where worlds still rise and fall, nebulae of thoughts and condensed wormholes of emotions, ready to make you lose yourself and everything else in, where stars appear at any given moment and Supernova flashes are a common occurrence: her eyes… In a fraction of the time it takes for the soul to realize its nature, my light, her light, all the lights that ever were or ever will be, both dark and vivid, hidden or obscene formed a spectrum indivisible by nothing than the heart-reason prism, and in no manner by a measly, simplistic instrument constructed of cold condensed surfaces that merely copied one upon another, transporting form but not substance, creating but crystals of chipped Cosmos encapsulating casts of human conscience… It is alive, it has grown roots and it’s growing inwards, inverted and uncomprisingly unstoppable inside of me!  So it was born, and so it lives on: by these glimpses of blinks in the photon’s eye, by those tiny moments when you are nothing yet everything, when moving so fast you feel like grabbing light and whip it like a whip, with thunder and lightning alongside your shoulders and splashes of electric cuts that bleed…Life And I cannot help but wonder…how many of my atoms, formerly belonging to one of the Great Poets:  Ovidius, Homer, Virgil, how many of them, residing now in me, in my right temple or in the valves that open my heart, how many of them will release the energies they contained in a time where Aeneas walked the earth, lifting me higher and higher, how many of them will irradiate like a million plutonium Suns…just so that I can start to understand…how? (Because how is much more important than why.)

Heaven

Tell me there’s a Heaven…

From Behind Shadows

Listen:

Summer’s Banner (Haiku)

 Summer wind has come
Its banner; so old and torn
Calling for freedom…

Scorching Summer

Dreaming of a sunbathed beach with white sand and a blue,blue sea…

“Torii” and the Sacrum-Profane Equilibrium

A torii is a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the profane to the sacred (according to Wikipedia).
After a long night partying at a friend’s house, somewhere in a remote Romanian village, faraway from the agitation and frenetic pulse of the city, after singing by the fire and watching the stars while lying on my back in the fresh grass full of dew, after everybody else had fallen asleep, I stood there awake, wrapped in a blanket and looking into the remains of the fire as they wood slowly gave away its last shine and the coal tried to shine on but the creeping sunrise was slowly extinguishing.
And then, one of my friends asked (half dozed by booze, I’ll admit) : “What state of matter does fire represent?”
The correct chemistry answer was: “A mixture of hot gases, vapors and, if the heat is enough, ionized gases a.k.a plasma”
He replied,in a somewhat unconvinced way: “Is that what fire means to you?”

Obviously, the scientific answer was not the one he was looking for. And then it struck me.
It was about everything else. The outing, the fire, fun and good company, the Sun rising beyond the eastern hills… to us, it was a return to innocence, something sacred in a bond to our ancestral origins and traditions, to the greater meaning in the wind’s whispers and the magic in the Nightingale’s songs.
I emerged from my protective cover, picked up my camera and, barefoot and half asleep, like through an autumn reverie, I started climbing towards the highest eastern hill for the upcoming sunrise. Grass felt so soft, air started to warm up and the sky filled with pastel colors that glimmered through the thin clouds.
The road lead under these gigantic power poles that carried the energy from a Hydroelectric power plant some 100 kilometers away. The buzzing of the lines, as the  10,000 volts passed through theme brought an even more ethereal feeling as if an energetic barrier had been set between the green waves and the human civilization residing beyond it.

So, I passed and started shooting as the Sun was slowly climbing the horizon. I can’t tell for how I have been there but when I turned towards the poles I saw four of my friends taking a walk (probably in a desire to catch the sunrise).

They stopped under the massive structure as I did, staring in wonder and that is when the photograph happened.

I chose this title as a reminder of what should be kept truly sacred in our hearts: the purity, the simplicity and innocence of all things in the world. No religious fanaticism, no rituals, no obligations.

“Sakura” sau a fi la locul potrivit, la momentul potrivit

Fotografia de mai sus are poveste puţin mai ciudată pentru că e una din acele fotografii in care o secundă face diferenţa între un cadru ratat şi unul de succes.
Mergeam pe stradă, în lumina dimineţii,caldă şi plăcută,puţin somnoros după un curs deosebit de plictisitor la o materie deosebit de plictisitoare.
Cu câteva zile înainte,cumpărasem un Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 din agoniseala proprie şi eram tare curios să-l probez.
Plimbându-mă liniştit,cu căştile in urechi si ceva muzică sprinţară sa ma facă să îmi revin din amorţeala ce mă cuprinsese, observ un petic de soare undeva lângă rădăcina unui copac.
Era o simplă pungă de polietilenă pe care vreun cetătean bine-crescut o abandonase cu 2 metri înainte de tomberonul adecvat.

Era totuşi ceva ce m-a facut să mă opresc: scăldată în lumina caldă a dimineţii de primăvară, se găsea,aşezata pe acea pungă mizerabilă, o singură floare de cireş alături de câteva petale rătăcite, un soi de alai pentru Regina Singuratică (asta a fost prima imagine care mi-a sărit în ochi când am descoperit mica scenă).
Fără sa zăbovesc mult, am scos camera din rucsac şi am început să mă mişc după lumină.
Intamplarea face ca, fiind o zi de luni, măturătorii sa iasă la curăţenia de primăvară, sub tridentul primarului care, “de nebun ce e”, vrea oraş curat cu orice preţ şi îi “scoală cu noaptea-n cap” şi îi mai şi trimite la muncă.

Cum îmi potriveam eu setările, am apucat sa declanşez doar de două ori până când m-am trezit cu o mătură sfărâmând cadrul mirific din ocularul meu şi făcându-l,pe veci,irepetabil si pierdut.
Cum căştile mă împiedicau să aud vreun zgomot în jurul meu şi fiind captivat peste măsură de cadrul din obiectiv, nu am observat apropierea unuia dintre măturătorii mai sus menţionaţi căuia îi păsa de ceea ce făceam eu acolo mai puţin decât îi pasă unui unui elefant care trece peste muşuroiul unor furnici.
Am decis să nu-i reproşez nimic rromului de 2 metri, buduhănos  şi duhnind a alcool ieftin la prima oră a dimineţii. 😉

Mai târziu, ajuns acasă, am încărcat cele două cadre in Photoshop şi, cu inima cât un purice, m-am rugat ca măcar una să fie la fel de reuşită pe cât îmi părea mie pe LCD.
Imaginea este nemodificată, cu excepţia câtorva retuşuri de culoare şi o virare uşoară către copper-roz.