Artsy Fartsy Porto
Hey, in case you folks don’t know, Ann and I are working on another big move. Reluctantly (from a “we really would have preferred not to go through this again” perspective), but absolutely necessary (from a “this is intolerable, we cannot live like this” perspective). Anyway, Ann and I are in Amsterdam taking care of some business for the move (if you don’t have a solid guess about where we’re moving to, you’re DAFT [google DAFT or Dutch American Friendship Treaty]). Anyway, I haven’t forgotten you so there are a couple of posts in the pipe to keep you entertained while we’re away. Now on to the blog post proper:
While I am very serious about my photography, I try not to take myself too seriously. One could probably write a whole blog post (or a PhD dissertation) about why that’s so, but let’s just say that life is too serious to take things seriously all the time. Particularly one’s self. So when I refer to my work as artsy fartsy, it’s in recognition of the fact that I’m very aware that for many, you’re going to think, “What? Another door?” So yeah, another door. Or whatever else catches my eye because you never really know how the photograph will turn out and what something may look like photographed unless you make a photograph of it. And the trip to Porto brought that out in me again; that quest to see things anew.
It helped that the Mercado do Bolhão had finally opened. On our first trip to Porto in January 2020 I wanted to visit the open-air market, only to find it was closed and they had torn the building down. Now, in October 2022, the new building had finally opened. We had to go inside. It has an outside, ring-like building that has commercial shop-fronts (still mostly vacant) facing the street, a wide interior veranda that is probably packed with local farm stands on Saturdays, and the open-air, but covered ground floor market that offers more permanent stalls covering everything from fresh fish to flowers. The light that morning was striking and I couldn’t help but try to see how the light would play with the new construction and its very intricate detailing.
I’m still trying to get a real feel for what the Q2MR will do, and this was a good opportunity to see how it could handle metallic surfaces and harsh sunlight.
Down by the stalls, I made some more photographs tending towards the opposite range of surface and light qualities.
As we made our way out of the market, we returned to the more normal street photographs that I’m becoming accustomed to. It helped that everything was so new for An and Kit, so there were frequent stops, giving me time to find images and then to wait until the right moment came along.
And of course there were the standard doorways and related structures and graphics. What can I say . . . I can’t help myself.
Although Porto doesn’t quite match Lisbon on the tagging front, it definitely has more than Braga and sometimes it’s quite interesting. Other times . . . well, other times it’s just graffiti.
One of the things I’m enjoying with the Q2MR is the ability to crop images in-frame, to “zoom-in” so to speak. It allows me to see in the viewfinder the image below, which amounts to a slight telephoto lens, even though the camera lens is a wide angle.
Coming out of the camera, the .jpg looks like the image above, but the raw file has the full 28 mm (actually a bit wider) field of view that the camera and sensor actually captures.
For this set of images, I worked with just the .jpg images and did very minimal adjustments to them. I’m pretty busy right now and wanted to get some pleasure in with the zillion things I’m taking care of, so keeping things quick and simple was the name of the game. Fortunately, the camera (like pretty much all cameras these days) is pretty impressive.
We eventually made it down to the São Bento train station. You’ll recognize it from the photos of Kit and An, which was what Ann was focusing on. Me? Not so much. I’m such a bad dad.
As we made our way uphill to cross the Douro River into Vila Nova da Gaia, I used the camera’s ability to crop the image to focus on the complex of rooftops that prevails in the maze of streets leading down to the river. It really is a fun place to wander around.
In Gaia we made our way back down the hill towards the river and found this interesting set of stairs (and wall art).
And as we wandered Gaia’s maze of streets, and eventually across to Porto’s maze on the way back to the car, I fell into my more-recent subject matter.
Pausing to take a photograph of anything that really caught my eye, and seeing if I can make a photograph of it.
Sometimes I think I could really spend days on end wandering streets, finding compositions of things that probably bore most people.
Self Portrait?
But that’s ok. I do this for me. I’m just thankful that Ann took care of the family photographs that day.