NICOLAS HENRI PHOTOGRAPHY
This is the Blog of Swiss Photographer Nicolas Henri

Snap Happy

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I have never been a fan of cell phone cameras. The images look like s*%?. As a photographer, when you take a camera in your hands, you turn into man or woman with a mission. You are out to create great imagery. At the same time things get complicated, because being photographer you aspire for quality. You start worrying about angles, composition, light, exposure, expression… So why would anyone even bother with a cell phone camera, where a lot (not all) of your photographic concerns simply can’t be addressed?

You end up with a small, noisy, usually badly exposed, shaky image. Hell, you can’t even make decent prints of them… unless you’re going for fine art printing on stamps!

I recently started doing it anyway. Not for client or personal work of course, but perhaps just to keep my eye more alert, scanning my everyday world for decent snaps. When looking through my iPhone camera roll recently I discovered, that these pictures have something about them, which I don’t find in my other work. (And I don’t mean technical quality here.) I think it has something to do with just the fact, that quality concerns go right out the window. With the exception content and composition. In a way it forces you to a more basic, perhaps more pure level of photography. It’s a little like shooting with a Holga camera, where based on poor build quality, you never quite know what you get and you stop to care and jut see what happens.

I’m not saying you should all toss your 5D Mark II’s and D3’s on eBay, but I believe it can make you better photographer, when you start to let go of the technical quality obsession from time to time and just let things happen. Knowing that you can do that, lets you see things and moments around you, which might have passed by unnoticed otherwise - simply because you didn’t have your tank of a camera, softboxes and reflectors set up. And in the end, you might just bring a bit of that mindset back to the big and important shoots (where all your gear IS on the ready) and catch just that moment where the model gracefully scratches her ankle, bringing a human element into anotherwise synthetic fashion shoot… you get the idea.

I leave you with a few of my recent iPhone snaps. These were “enhanced” in camera so to speak, with a neat little free app for the iPhone called Polarize. It basically trashes down your images even more plus adding a nifty Pola frame to it. There’s even a flickr group for images shot with it.

Snap happy!

Posted by nicolas_henri on March 26th, 2009 :: Filed under Artist Technique, Photography
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Revisit

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I spent the weekend re-editing my portfolio. Redux is the key in this process. You need to throw out anything, which you have the slightest doubt about… that of course, when editing your own work tends to leave you with an empty portfolio… and if it doesn’t… well you’ve got a problem at hand in any case!

After throwing out a lot of stuff - killing three entire sections in fact - and reducing all the remaining galleries to the bare essence, I decided to browse the archives for the off chance of a hidden gem. Any photographer has them… those hidden folders, secured deeply on some external hard drive… just waiting to be rediscovered or dismissed forever. A few minutes into the process I stumbled upon this:

“The Whispering Hedge” is what I called the file years ago. I was happy to see it again as it comes from a very different time of my photographic career…  a simpler time… shot “only” with available light. It was taken during my first exhibition which I shared with Jakob Krattiger, a truly gifted painter. We were trying to combine photography with painting in a thematic exhibition. That day we were hanging out at the gallery, waiting for people to come streaming in… they didn’t. So we decided to go take some pictures… it was as simple as that. Years later I look at it and it sparks new ideas. Prehaps these ideas will make it into my coming exhibition…

A few hours later another one pops out of the archives:

“In An Hour Darkly” reads the file name. Perhaps it was a dark hour, perhaps not so much. This one used to be in my portfolio in the very first installment of my website. This is very early stuff from when I first fell in love with cameras. Available light again (I knew nothing of strobes back then!). It was taken inside of a gigantic, modern sculpture made of steel walls in my home town. The actual model I was shooting is the lady out of focus in the back. The girl in front was her companion, making sure no weird business was going on with this strange bearded photogropher… At some point I asked her to come into the shot because she was just standing by, looking terribly bored. This turned out to be the best shot of the set.

Both these shots are back in my official portfolio now. Have a look here, along with some other new stuff!

Perhaps I took them into the new portfolio because they remind me of what photography can also be: As simple as a click in a moment of inspiration. Nothing more, nothing less!

And now it’s time to have a glimpse into your archives! Connect those hard drives and delve into your photographic past. Send in your archived and forgotten gems to contact@nicolashenri.ch and I will show them in an upcoming post! I am more than curious what you have in store for me!

Posted by nicolas_henri on March 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Photography, Web
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