Belfort en zwart-wit

Generally speaking, I’m a color person.

What I mean by this is just that given a choice between monochrome and rich, vivid color, I’m going for the latter every time.

Furniture?

Clothing?

Photography?

Doesn’t really matter, that’s typically what I’m picking.

Most times, if I’m processing monochrome, it’s because I screwed something up. Couldn’t get the white balance right, or multiple light sources, or weird exposures. That kind of thing. It’s very rare that I’d head to B&W as an artistic choice first.

My one big explosion of monochrome was done my first winter in New York – a gnarly one, as first winters inevitably are. I was making instant prints on early experimental Impossible Project film and watching ungodly amounts of the first few seasons of Law & Order. I still think that series contains some of my best works. (God that feels like a thousand lifetimes ago!)

I wonder sometimes if it’s that I can’t see in monochrome that I can’t shoot in monochrome.

The beauty of a long-term hobby is that you’ve tried nearly everything once or twice over the years. My early scratching attempts at photography, though fraught with egregious dutching that makes my head spin, provided opportunities to give nearly any and all techniques a go.

In those early explorations I did go through an Alphaville (Godard, not the synth band) phase that I think sucked out all future inclinations towards moody contrasty abstracty discomforting B&Ws.

All that to say that I couldn’t for the life of me put a finger on why a monochrome treatment made so much sense to me as I was processing photos of the Ghent Bell Tower, but here we are!

Fireworkstravaganza

Just like Icelandic food, Icelandic fireworks merit their own conversation. I had never been to a country as fireworks-mad as I am… and I’ve been in Asia for Lunar New Year. Enter Iceland.

A truth – but joke at the same time – of Iceland is that they have a lot of “most x per capita” records. It’s the nature of a small country. Most professional footballers per capita. Most authors per capita. Most energy generated per capita. If you ever have a reason to spend New Year’s Eve in Iceland, you would not be hard pressed to say, “most fireworks purchased per capita” either.

For what it’s worth, the fireworks sales support ICESAR, the Icelandic Association for Search & Rescue. So you can feel doubly good when blowing things up.

All of Reykjavík (or so it seems) gathers at Hallgrímskirkja after the annual NYE special Skaupið is finished, of course. There are actual blast zones designated for lighting fireworks, but beyond that it’s fairly a free for all.

You have everything from full-on rockets to much tamer sparklers, spinners, and cone fountains. All of the rockets have the advantage of exploding near the absurdly picturesque background of the church tower.

I could do this every New Year for the rest of my life.

"This music crept by me upon the waters"

““This music crept by me upon the waters”
and along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street”

— T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Ohrid was not necessarily a place I should ever have made my way to. I tend to gravitate towards the swirling metropolitan chaos of capital cities when visiting new countries. On this trip, however, it was this lake-side jewel that spurred the whole thing. I saw a picture of St. John the Theologian in the snow – half frosted gingerbread house, half orthodox chapel – and I was sold.

In truth, it shouldn’t have been a surprising destination as Ohrid (Lake, town, environs) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the source of my only example of checklist travel. Ecclesiastical Byzantine architecture is among my favorite styles, and it is truly reflected and amplified in the town.

My one great disappointment was that St. Sophia (funny how I kept running into her) was closed, so I missed out on any number of frescos, but all in all had a delightful time exploring the churches.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as many stray cats as I did there.

It bordered nearly on the ridiculous.

Some posed, some ran… I even bore witness to an impromptu feeding from some local boys, carrying a grocery bag of tiny fried fish.

Never ones to be outdone, the town’s stray dogs seemed to make a point to catch my eye.

At the end of the day, the greatest delight was the lake itself, the bejeweled backdrop to every photo and every vista alike. I’d love to find my way back in the summer to soak up the sun and have more people around for eating and drinking and dancing – all things I found quite excellent in Macedonia, particularly given that it was the crisp frigid early winter.

Sveta Sofia

“The city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.”

— From my last post. Yes, I just quoted myself.

And love it was with beautiful Sofia—which, incidentally, is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable (i.e. SO-fee-ya) and not like the name as I had previously assumed. I settled on it as a destination as I so often do: finding a cheap flight. In truth, I had wanted to see Macedonia but Sofia was a mere bus ride away and so it was settled.

I arrived on an early Qatar Airways flight from Doha, easily the emptiest I’ve traveled on in years. The emptiness, it would follow, came from the fact that it was of course Christmas morning and most people taking that route had already showed up.

In my defense, most Orthodox-predominant countries celebrate Christmas after the 12th day (so, January 7th), and I quite reasonably assumed Bulgaria was the same. Thankfully, I figured it out prior to departure, but that was little consolation for the hauntingly quiet void that was the city center.

This proved a double-edged sword for my travel passions, which is to say what I look for when I evaluate any destination:

1. People

2. Food

3. Architecture

4. Music

Nº 3 was of course much easier than it would otherwise have been and Nº 2 was not a problem as my hotel was lovely and accommodating. Nº 1 was a near impossibility – everyone was home with families and those who were out and about seemed to be either going to their families or to church – which meant that Nº 4 was an actual impossibility.

So it goes.

I had more than enough architecture to occupy my time. Sofia is astonishingly rich with religious architecture, and I happened to be staying within a ten minute walk of a synagogue (pictured above), a mosque (pictured below), the Catholic cathedral (an altogether hideous building that I don’t think I attempted to photograph), and of course numerous Orthodox churches.

The name of the city itself comes from the church of Света София (Sveta Sofia, meaning either “Saint Sophia” or, as its contemporary the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, “Holy Wisdom”), so it should come as no surprise that the religious tradition runs deep. The Banya Bashi mosque is a relic of Ottoman rule (as one so often finds in the Balkans), and its congregation is primarily Turkish (I had assumed Albanian which is true of neighboring Macedonia, but as it turns out the Albanian population in Bulgaria is very low).

You truly couldn’t have picked a more stereotypical weather pattern for this part of the world. While I find the urban decay (no makeup pun intended) sublimely beautiful, I can see how one might find it too evocative of post-Soviet melancholy. It’s worth mentioning, for the record, that Bulgaria was indeed not part of the USSR but was Eastern Bloc nonetheless and bordered Yugoslavia.

One last thought on the weather – as previously discussed: it’s interesting how different the sky color ended up in each of these photos. Some of that was caused by the light or angle thereof, most of it the victim of my creative editing. In retrospect, there is something to be said for a stylistically consistent set of images… and something else to be said for the platonic ideal of a singular image standing alone.

I’m happy to say I here achieved neither. And, as ever, so it goes.

Post-Processing, the spectacular crutch.

Is it a digression if you start from that point? Post-processing is one of those lovely photographic terms that serves as both an analog holdover and a misleading descriptor of digital workflow. Originally, it happened after processing (i.e. developing) the film. Today, it could be argued that taking a digital raw file and finalizing settings is in fact the processing; in that sense, one could deem Lightroom/ACR/etc. the processing and Photoshop the post.

It seems to me so often the pretentious gearhead semi-novices who argue for and pedestalize a platonic ideal of a photograph that come in critical of manipulation. The type of people that – if I’m being catty – produce technically perfect, soulless, story-less images. You’ll see the judgment thrown in hashtags like #SOOC or #nofilter.

Is it important to learn how to use your tools? Yes

Is it important to maintain some rigid orthodoxy around what the tools produce? No

By the same token, I disdain a “fuck it, I’ll fix it in post” mentality as well. My feelings are this: become a master of the camera you use, digital or analog. (You will miss photos if you don’t.) Craft images that tell stories. As long as you’re not a photojournalist or selling a product – two areas where realism and fidelity are key – the world is your oyster in that quest.

Why does any of this matter? Well, because I hit bad weather in Sofia, of course.

More to come on Sofia itself, but as a quick fly by: the city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.

Pictured here is the view from my hotel (the shockingly charming Sofia Balkan) of the church Света Неделя – Sveta Nedelya – a name which refers either to the term “Holy Sunday” or Saint Kyriaki but is somewhat debated.

This is what my brain goes through when I’m dissecting an image. There are a million and one things to consider when getting to the final image. My first concern was the final aspect ratio (more thoughts on ratios here) as I’d decided a crop was necessary, given the excavations and cars in the foreground. I also wanted to brighten the church without losing the definition in the clouds, particularly since the clouds above the church weren’t much to look at in the first place. Finally, I knew that way-too-modern logo would get in the way.

After some quick cropping and some equally quick exposure adjustments, I had a fairly workable subject and thought first that I’d try monochrome. This would both hide the Huawei logo and allow me to bring down the blues to have more cloud definition. The resulting image is fine, but I missed the hallmark green of the domes.

I returned to color and played with the greens. Is it an exaggerated image? Quite. At the end of the day, it was a much more interesting composition than the original image and as one of many pieces in a tale of the architectural identity of Sofia, it would do the job. However, that bright dab of red kept drawing my eye away.

A quick pop into the shop and voilà, a finished image. It was all about removing distractions to focus on what actually mattered: this gorgeous, storied edifice.

She Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease

Here's a quick confession: I'm Tuscan. It's where my surname originates. It's where I first came to love Italy. It's in my bones, in my cooking repertoire, and (sadly) in my accent. Yet when I picture the Central Italian countryside, my brain immediately hops to Umbria.

Umbria is a feast for the senses: rolling green hills cresting over a valley of kelly, gold, and forest fields, bejeweled with a sprinkling of vibrant red, buttery yellow, and rich purple wildflowers. The air smells like sun-warmed grass, a faint but often present hint of smoke, and happiness. There’s no place I’d rather be for a country trip.

I’m used to seeing Umbria from the hill towns outside of Perugia, over the meandering rivers and streams feeding the Tiber as it wends its way down to Rome. This last visit, I finally made the journey east to Gubbio, one valley over, after years of trying to find a way out there.

Gubbio is a pristine, formidable, medieval town, built atop Monte Ingino, a hill in an Apennine no man’s land between Perugia and the equally formidable and equally medieval Urbino in Le Marche, the neighboring region.

A quick aside: that region's name is sometimes translated when discussed in English, as opposed to the standard anglicization à la Florence (Firenze), Venice (Venezia)... Leghorn (Livorno, truly the worst of the bunch). I remember a guide book my parents had twenty or so years ago called Umbria and the Marches, and I could not for the life of me figure out what parades had to do with a region of Italy and why they were so important as to merit inclusion in the title.

There are views to be had from the winding streets that work their way slowly up the mountainside, but the best viste are from the top. And what better way to get up there than a two-person cage? Enter the Funivia Colle Eletto.

I had anticipated a standard funicular as you see not uncommonly across the peninsula, but the funivia is something unto itself... somewhere between ski lift and go-go cage, flying over the greenery of Monte Ingino.

The ride alone was thrilling, but of course the real reward came after disembarking and getting a view of the whole valley from on high.

Beyond taking in the panorama, there is a bar and a restaurant, along with the church of the patron of Gubbio, Sant'Ubaldo. Sant'Ubaldo himself rests in his own church, displayed in a glass sarcophagus before the altar, complete with a mitre that makes him look more wizard than bishop.