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My photo project for 2024
It is here… The New Year… 2024! And in this year I intend to start a new photo project of mine focused on still life, by which I mean manually created compositions photographed either indoor or outdoor. I paid attention to still-life photography back in 2015 and 2016, you can read about that experience here. I liked the style and wanted to continue to improve my skills as it was a genre I seemed to have a sense of. True, in the following months and years I took a few photos here and there after creating some simple still-life compositions but I missed guidance and lacked space, technical skills and…
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Ideas lost and forgotten
I commute to work daily and on my ways there and back, often the dots connect and I have ideas that capture my attention. Sometimes also words of a song I am listening to on the radio along the way trigger a train of thoughts I am glad to get on. I believe the brain works in a different mode at that time… And I often think “this would be interesting for my blog to ponder and write about…” But when I come home, the ideas are usually long forgotten, replaced by happenings at work and home routine and then in the evening I stare at the empty screen of…
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Easter hope
Easter always brings a message to me conveying hope that nothing is so bad it could not turn into something good. The concept of suffering and how it could lead to something great is difficult to grasp but if one opens themselves to the hope, the life can feel and become very different. Sacrificing oneself may be utterly wrong or utterly heroic or utterly compassionate, it all depends so much on circumstances. From the point of Christianity it is a gesture of love giving a man a chance to make their lives better. I know, if one is not a Christian, the gesture seems non-existent, yet it is there in…
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Magical
Some places feel magical without any obvious reason. While you might be bored and wondering why I am staring at a spot or an object, I might feel a pull towards it not being able to take my eyes away. Another time it might be vice versa. Me wondering and you staring. I experience such a situation repeatedly on photo walks with my husband as we are often attracted by quite different sceneries and objects… The triptychs below are created from two photos that I took at the end of last year – one of an old cemetery and the other one of a garden in the same village. Both…
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Playful water lilies
Yesterday I was asked what definition I would assign to a “photograph” and after some pondering, I came up with this: A photograph is a rendering of reality that may be documentary but also emotional, abstract or even somewhat imaginary, yet still preserving the core of that reality. Well, but what is that core, you may ask, it sounds sort of vague. And I would say that it is the hard-to-grasp distinction between a photo and an image… and we would be at the beginning again. You know, some people say that photography excludes digital art. But digital art has many faces, right, and some of it may preserve the aspect of…
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Walk in Dobřív
There are many ways in which you get to know new places. I came to Dobřív along with my husband last year to capture some photos in the local hammer mill. We found out that next to the old mill there are also other interesting buildings in the village, houses keeping the air of old times. Here are a few photos from our walking around…
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Glassworks cutting room
As I mentioned in the previous post, last summer we visited old glassworks in Harrachov. It was interesting to see how the glasses are produced manually by men blowing into hot glass pieces and forming thus shapes of the glasses but the part of the glassworks that got my full attention was the room where the clear glasses are decorated manually by cutting their surface by a grinder, creating so various ornaments. I was absolutely taken aback by the quiet atmosphere of that room and I wished I had opportunity to spend at least an hour or two by absorbing the light, the colours and the objects and their mutual…
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Free to have a vision
Sometimes we see or understand things that others do not recognize but we are afraid to share our vision not to be laughed at or misunderstood. And if we muster the courage to share and do not get any positive feedback or encouragement as our vision may not be interesting enough for those around us, we may feel to be let down or not appreciated. But that does not change a thing about the fact that the freedom to have a vision and follow it is still there. Follow your visions. They may not be always breath-taking but they will let you grow…
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Appeal of gardening
Is gardening an acquired taste or do you need to have particular genes to enjoy working in the garden? I loved my grandma’s garden since childhood but for our children (who actually are not kids any more), our garden represents just hard and repetitive work. Yes mom, the flowers are nice, the gooseberries are good, but don’t pressure us to waste our precious time by performing those tiresome and boring gardening activities… How could I make them understand? Perhaps YOU understand? OK, I won’t torture you by asking such questions, I’ll rather share some of the beauty I find worthy of the gardening effort. First, would you recognise the plants…
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Peony magic
The tree Peony (Paeonia suffruticosa) that we have in our garden does not look great this year. The weather has been enormously dry this spring and the leaves of the bush are partly dry as well. Also the buds and flowers have been fading quickly. My son noticed yesterday that one of the lower growing branches was broken so I cut it off entirely and put into a little vase at home. It looked tempting to be captured and eventually I used it and another even more faded flower for my still life photography. Funnily enough, I ended up with quite a different photo than I started with… Isn’t the…
