Urban Section Redesigned

The re-design and re-organisation of the Urban section is now finished. There are a few new sections as well: Building for Utopia showcases surrealism in architecture; Paris B&W contains black & white wide-angle photos taken with the Holga 120WPC, and the two Where Angels Tread sets feature images of cemeteries. Enjoy.

New Urban iPhone Photographs

I've added a whole section of iPhone photographs to the Urban gallery with a series of recent photos, mostly from Berlin.
Additionally, I added a few sets of photos taken in Paris. 

The 365 Project is now finished

Last Saturday I posted the last image for my 365 project, Seasons of Glass. One iPhone image a day for a full year, starting it on the very day I got my iPhone. Read here a summary of what it was like.


The blog will continue, although I will no longer be posting on a daily basis.

People Section Redesigned

I am currently in the process of redesigning the whole Always Arriving site. The first part is finished, the People section, which I just uploaded. Please check it out: www.gheedon.com/People .


The new look and feel is a lot different from the old one. Rather than re-develop everything from scratch with lots of self-made javascript code, I decided to use RapidWeaver, a web editor which comes complete with templates. All I needed to do was set up a CSS file to render fonts and colours the way I prefer them. As to setting up the galleries, I can do that in iPhoto and simply import them into RapidWeaver. No more resizing photos and creating thumbnails by hand... . Ok, you do give up a certain amount of freedom in design, but the time gained is formidable.


And the nice thing: the pages also look great on the iPhone and iPad (and hopefully, other mobile devices as well).


I will continue with the redesign; the Urban section is next. I'm keeping the Holga section for last, seeing that it is the largest one.


Enjoy viewing the photos and let me know what you think - feedback is welcome.

Living in Whitefield

I recently returned to Bangalore, India for the fourth time in less than a year. A heavy work load meant that I had less time to check out the city, but as I have pretty much seen every sight twice over, that was alright. Instead I spent some time walking around the neighbourhood where I was staying, which is out in the Whitefield suburb where most of the IT companies are located. The neighbourhood is a working class district around which the glass palaces of the IT companies are growing like mushrooms. To a degree it felt very rural: women washing their laundry in a lake, goats, chicken, dogs and cows roaming the streets. 
I posted a selection of the photos I shot in Whitefield here; it is a combination of pics taken with a Holga and the iphone.

The 200 Mark (The #365 Project)

As you may know, I embarked on Seasons of Glass, a project a little while ago to shoot and post a picture a day for year. That project has now reached its 200 mark, and I figured 200 would be a good number to write up a first summary.


I should start out that while overall I'm very happy with the results I achieved so far, and with the quality of the photos I managed to take, there were days when I felt like canceling the project - where I thought that the project, in the end, was more about quantity than quality. Fortunately, 'though, these days were rather rare. Overall, pulling the project through has kept me on my toes. It made me look for possible subjects everywhere and at every hour, challenged me to find things I normally would not have photographed and also made me take detours and discover new areas and aspects of Berlin. Overall, the project is a mixture of several things: a documentary of sorts about the places I see (and thus, to a large degree, it is about Berlin) as well as the things that I do. It is also an exploration of taking photos with the iPhone and the possibilities of editing these, or even using them to create collages, multiple exposures and drawings. In the end, 'though, the driving force has always been to find one picture that not only was worth being put up and shown to the public, but one that was maybe better than all the ones before (sometimes that also meant putting up not one picture but a small set of images).


Looking at the tags that have now assembled over 200 days, it is not surprising that Berlin is up there at the top of the list; and following it the two topics which have been the focus of my photography for the past ten years: urban and people. Seeing how long the winter was this year, it's also not surprising to see that tag way up at the top. Another tag, Little Things, is a bit more surprising: it's the expression I use to denote photos of small objects (statues, flowers, anything) I find around the flat, the hotel rooms, on the sidewalk. The kind of things I normally would not have bothered to shoot. Other tags, like toonpaint, doubleX and collage, reflect some of the techniques I apply using various iPhone apps.


The rest of the tags pretty much gives a nice summary of what my life was like the last 200 days: two trips to India, the daily grind of taking subways and trains, life in Neukoelln...


There are 165 more days to come: summer is waiting in the aisles and hopefully a couple more trips are coming up before the end of the Seasons of Glass. I hope to have fun with the remaining shoots, and I hope you'll enjoy it as well.

Bye Bye Winter

Spring is here, sort of. In honour of that new season, here is a look back at the long long winter we've had: Berlin Under Snow, a new set which I created on the Urban page. The photos were taken with a Holga and with the iPhone. Enjoy.