It contains photos of times past: people dressed in the style of their time, billboards with traditional advertising, cities shaped in ways now alien. It’s mesmerizing, and in a different way from sites collecting pictures of actors and actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as the appropriately named Old Hollywood. Vintage Everyday is different because it collects images of everyday people and everyday places, not famous movie stars, and in a sense it shows the human side of history. A similar feeling can be had by browsing one’s own family photo albums, but in that case the familiarity of the faces prevents from observing the surrounding elements: when a photo depicts someone you know, you notice them and don’t pay much attention to what’s around them, or even to the details about themselves. Oftentimes people have pointed out things about my own photos of models that I had completely missed, despite having taken and worked on the image for a while.

A few pages into Vintage Everyday, I had an epiphany that I want to share with you. I noticed that at the time these photos were taken, they probably weren’t that special. Certainly in the 1940s having a camera was not an ordinary thing as it is now, as they were harder and more expensive to operate: I have this romantic idea of a photographer being seen if not as a full-fledged artist, at least as someone with a special ability, so to speak: you couldn’t just pick up a camera and start shooting. A posed portrait, as many of our own family albums clearly show, was a big deal. However, I’m quite confident that all these pictures at the time were just that, pictures. “Oh look, there’s a photo of a lady walking down a New York street.” “Ah, these kids are playing with a make-believe car.” These images, at the time, must have been relatively uninteresting except to the parties involved.

Fast forward a few decades, and they become treasure troves. History gets in the way and gives these photos a whole new meaning. That lady isn’t just walking in New York City, she is walking confidently in New York City; and the workers in the background, blurred in distance to the point that maybe nobody had noticed them before, are stealing a glance at her while unloading crates of fruit from a truck. Is it the first time they see a woman being that confident? It may very well be: times were a-changing. And those kids playing are blissfully enjoying their own fantasy world, oblivious to the fact that their fathers are fighting a war on the other side of the Atlantic; perhaps that’s why their mothers look at them from the kitchen window, undecided between hope and concern.

At the center — or rather at the side — of everything, always the same thing: a camera and a photographer. That’s how everyday history is documented, with rolls of film by unnamed photographers preserving reality for posterity. Every single photo that was ever taken and that will ever be taken is by its very own definition unique, because at any given moment in time and at any given place in space there is room for only one camera. Every time a shutter fires, life as it is right there and right then is immortalized. Time stops as the image becomes a frail and irreplaceable time capsule.

Even a photo that looks plain or boring at first sight may acquire significance over time. Just look around you: how many things have changed in the last ten years? How many benches have been added or removed, how many shops have changed names, how many buildings have been repainted? And how many times have you seen photos from other countries and felt that even seemingly familiar landscapes were not that familiar after all?

The ubiquity of cameras today means that we can effectively document the changes brought by history, virtually without any effort. That doesn’t mean that it’s become a useless process; on the contrary, it means that we are all empowered and we all should use this ability more often and with more dedication, once we grasp how far-reaching this may be.

Perhaps it’s finally time to stop taking useless selfies and turn the lens towards the world, so that the generations to come will be able to feel the same nostalgia for a time we never lived in as we do when we look at photos from a century ago.

(Image on top: Front Street, Marquette, Michigan, ca. 1909 — From Vintage Everyday)

Taking photos of people is something I had wanted to do for a long time, but I never managed to convince anyone to pose for me before. My origins as a photographer, in any case, are in the field of landscapes and macrophotography.

There is something about macrophotography that always fascinated and attracted me. I don’t have specific high-end equipment for that kind of images: I use basic extension tubes that allow my Sigma 18-200 zoom to focus much closer than normal. This way, I can be as a close as I want to my subject, at the expense of doing everything manually, including forcing the lens to be stopped down; the only help I can count on is assisted metering, which needs to be manually biased anyway.

The whole process is tedious, frustrating, annoying; and yet, it is also exceedingly pleasant at the same time. I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but for the longest time I felt that something eluded me. Then I realized what it was.

Some photographers find comfort into setting everything up; they can create exactly the scene that they want to shoot. In a way they work like abstract painters: they create something that’s not there. It’s their way of telling a story: they are fable tellers, they conjure up a tale and make it real in front of the lens, then play with it in post-process until it’s exactly what they had in mind. There is nothing wrong with it, and it’s an approach that eventually all photographers tinker with. There is indeed a fine line between a setting up staged picture and giving an existing scene a little help.

But staging an image is time-consuming, requires perfection that can only be achieved through long attempts at trial and error, and can be expensive: good equipment certainly is, as I was recently reminded by cheaper alternatives that broke down on me on day one.
Some people build their careers on staging shots. Fashion photographers, for instance, literally do that for a living. Many amateurs also enjoy fiddling with props until they get the shot just right, just for the sheer pleasure of creation.

I am a little different. While I have my own share of fun helping scenes “pop” in my pictures — for instance through the use of off-camera flashes or the like — I am more of an observer.
When I first started playing with digital cameras, over a decade ago, I was strongly against post-processing. You must forgive me here: I was young and, let’s say it, quite stupid. Being against something on the pretense that “straight out of camera” pictures are inherently better is, to say the least, preposterous. When I switched to reflex cameras, and especially to shooting RAW, I realized that post-processing is as important as exposing the scene in the first place. Still, I’m one of those people who would rather spend more time with a camera firing the shutter than with a mouse applying layer masks.

That is it: I am an observer.

When I set out to do macro work, for instance, I spend what to others must seem like an eternity on the same flower, taking countless images of the bugs hovering around it. I don’t even take my eye off the camera’s viewfinder. Everything around me is blackened out, and I am concentrated exclusively on the scene I watch through the lens, forgetful of any awkward position I may be in (I am usually reminded of that by muscle pain that arises a few hours later.)
I take hundreds of pictures. Many will be out of focus or blurry; that’s the price to pay for using cheap equipment: no autofocus, limited depth of field that can’t be easily changed, and so on. Some of the photos will be good to publish, with some little help in post-process, mostly to tweak colors and exposure. I like the challenge.
But that is not the reason I go through all of this. I could get a €400 dedicated macro lens and make it all easier, and eventually I will.

I do it this way because it lets me observe. After a few minutes of looking through the lens and seeing bees dancing over petals, bugs crawling on leaves, caterpillars embracing stems, spiders meticulously knitting webs; after a few minutes of this, I am part of that small, huge universe. I start seeing things that I wouldn’t see otherwise. I’ll notice the patterns, the rhythms, the details, and sometimes even the creatures, that are so small that upon first glance they appeared invisible.
Sometimes I don’t even immediately take the pictures off the memory card. The experience alone is worth it, regardless of whether any image is usable or not.

I recently realized that I do the same thing with landscape photography. In truth, I tend to do this with any kind of photography I am working on. Instead of setting up the scene, I observe it and document it without changing it. My strongest urge is to retain the purity of what’s before my eyes, so that I can capture it as fully as possible. I don’t try to make up a story to tell; rather, I record the story that’s already there. It is not always easy, and indeed at times I think it would be easier to just go ahead and set things up.

This is not to say that I will not try to optimize the results of my work: I often add light as I need, though the ultimate goal of that, for instance, is using the extra light to enhance what’s already there. You need specific light to make whirling puffs of smoke or falling droplets of water show on an image, but that’s where I’ll stop most of the time. Even my post-processing is fairly conservative: I will enhance the imageto match the feelings I was having when I shot it, but I never go too far with changes. Even with people, I’d rather have my models use props at the time of shooting than waste hours in Photoshop. More simply, I’d rather tinker with lenses and equipment to capture the scene than to change it beyond recognition.

I think that my approach to photography matches my personality. I was never the one who wanted to be in the spotlight; I’ve always rather enjoyed being on the sides, looking towards the stage instead of being on it. I feel that my role, as a photographer — and why not, as an all-around reporter — is to describe what’s there instead of making it up. It is just who I am, and what I like to do. I like to provide my viewers with the reality I see, enhanced in a way that I see fit, and have them derive their own version of the story that I wanted to tell. I am not as presumptuous as to think that I will always be able to convey my own emotions into an image, nor that the feelings I have about a scene are the same as those of any of my viewers.

This is, I believe, the beauty of photography. There is no good or wrong way of doing any single thing. Everything is open to choices across all the steps that go from the original emotion to the final image. No two photographers will take the same picture, and that’s what makes this art truly magic.

All I know is that I will keep observing reality and occasionally fiddling with it, to achieve what my ultimate goal is: to bring you stories to enjoy.

Making a website from scratch was a no-go: too much work, too little motivation.

A CMS, such as Coppermine? Not really, I have used several in the past and they felt clunkier. Plus, a personal website is very slow to gain any traction, if it ever does.

I considered going back to my first love, Pbase, only to feel as if I were walking through Pripyat.

Two options remained: DeviantArt and Flickr. I wasn’t too keen on either, given the previous impressions I had had from both. In any case, since I already had basic accounts on both, I went ahead.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt didn’t leave a positive mark on me. It’s clunky, complex, slow, unintuitive and hard to navigate. Its main problem is what some consider its strength: it’s multimedial, allowing all sorts of artistic contents on it. Whether you write poetry, take photos, paint, draw or sketch, you can upload it. For this reason, items are generally called “deviations”, in tune with the almost gothic-looking color scheme.

It does however provide immediate exposure as its homepage shows the most recent “deviations” uploaded by members, regardless of their status. I inevitably got my photos favorited within seconds from the upload, which I admit was nice… but didn’t do much in terms of actual networking. In fact, I often wondered whether there was something else about favoriting that I wasn’t familiar with, because most of the times my work was being favorited by people who did so for all sorts of different photos, and often it just felt random. There’s also a very heavy “hipster/poser” feeling to the community, something with which I’m personally not at ease.

In any case, the immediate exposure wasn’t enough for me to get over what I can undoubtedly call the most hideous upload process I have seen. You essentially have to upload one “deviation” at a time, and you must, in this order: select a category, type a title, fill in a description, disable downloading the full version (it’s on by default, and there’s no way to change that default), check a couple of checkboxes to take responsibility and ownership of contents, finally upload. Then you’re presented with a page that allows you to put up prints for sale and lets you choose in great detail which sizes should be made available; only after you follow through, you’re done. And you have to repeat this for every single image. (In truth, you can pre-upload several files at once even though it’s not intuitive at all — I found out by accident — but you still have to create deviations out of them one by one.)

Browsing the site is also fairly confusing: it’s not clear what constitutes your gallery, how albums are arranged, and what goes where. When I moved to Flickr, I deleted all my pictures on DeviantArt… or so I thought, because two months later I discovered by accident that I had only removed them from my profile page, and that they were still happily available somewhere in the gallery.

Now, I’m not saying that learning how the website works is impossible, as many people have done that and swear that it’s the greatest way to share your work. However, I greatly prefer something that is intuitive by default, and that’s flexible enough to take as little time as possible to use. I want to spend as much time as possible taking pictures, not posting them. Which leads me to why I prefer Flickr.

Flickr

Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, so if you have a Yahoo! account you don’t even have to register; you just log in. You’re already saving time. Now, let’s say you want to upload 15 pictures. You go to the upload page, click the Choose photos and videos link, and you can select your files, all 15 of them. You review the list if you want to, and click upload. The photos are uploaded sequentially, one after the other, and they start appearing in your photostream (Flickr’s name for all your photos) immediately. After that, and only if you want to, you are offered the possibility of quickly setting titles, descriptions and tags for all of them. In fact, you can apply the same tags to all the pictures with literally one click. You can also put them all into a set (Flickr’s name for an album) with a single click, and also create a new set if you want to.

And, since beauty lies in the details, Flickr does one very simple thing that DeviantArt is unable to do: the photo titles default to the file name, minus the extension. In other words, if the file name is “Lonely boat.jpg”, the photo will automatically be entitled “Lonely boat”. Why DeviantArt is unable to do this is unknown, but the result is obvious: you have to waste time typing it.

Adding metadata to the photos is also very quick: the “Organizr” uses a nifty drag and drop interface to do almost everything. Want to move a few pictures to a set? Select them and drag them into the set. Want to post them to groups? Same paradigm. Want to quickly geotag them? Drop them onto the map. And once you’re done, want to share a photo on Twitter? Set it as a blog once, and then just click on “Share”. One click and it’s done, with a nice bonus: if the photo is geotagged, so will the tweet. And that’s a great way to gain exposure, as more and more people search for local tweets.

However the great power of Flickr, and the thing that amazes me not just as a photographer but also — and especially — as a computer guy — is something else. I’m talking about the almost infinite ways to discover new contents. Let’s take a step back.

One of the biggest hurdles in computing, and generally in handling data, is creating powerful relations between pieces of information. This is both a technical challenge and a human need: too much data is as useful as no data at all. Does a map retain any usefulness if it’s cluttered with labels?

The worst mistake that can be done when it comes to handling huge amounts of information is not providing enough ways, or ways smart enough, to make the data accessible. Not only I want to be able to find what I’m interested in, but I also want to be able to find similar contents. The key word here is context.

Context, a human’s best friend

Flickr gets it just right, and goes as far as pushing context as optional URL parameters. For instance, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollino/5164107794/in/set-72157625085730718/ will open one of my photos and provide its position within one of my sets as a context. In practical terms, it provides a very cool thing: on the right side, you see a list of sets and groups that the photo appears in. In this case my “Macro” group is previewed, with four other thumbnails in addition to the current photo. This makes it a breeze to get an idea of what I put in that set immediately before and immediately after the photo in question. Of course, context is optional and you can access the same picture without it: if you go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollino/5164107794/, the context will default to my photostream.

While quickly accessing people’s sets this way is nice, it’s even better to navigate groups with it. In that same page, after the sets, there is a list of groups to which that photo was added. As soon as you hover over one of them, the total number of photos within that group is downloaded and shown. This is actually a great way to reduce load and give a smoother experience: why download something that you may not even be interested in? Clicking on the group name reveals, once again, the context-aware strip that we are familiar with. That’s an important point: familiarity. The pages are very similar, and that’s by design. You are more efficient when you know where to find what you’ll looking for. The white background and the abundant white space also makes it very easy on the eyes.

The gem here is that the context is retained when clicking on any of these names, be it a set, a group or the photostream. If you click on the “Nature” group, for instance, you are not taken to the homepage of the group, but rather to the group’s photo pool; even better, you are taken to the page where the current photo is located. This has two direct consequences: 1) the context is not lost, but is actually expanded; 2) you do not have to dig through hundreds or thousands of pictures to find where you were. Once again, the context is clearly shown in the URL: http://www.flickr.com/groups/naturegroup/pool/with/5164107794/ (at the time of writing, that’s page 498!)

The consequence is obvious: it is very easy to find interesting contents, simply because everything is connected in a stream. You even forget that your browser has a back button.

To make the experience even more pleasant, there are several keyboard shortcuts that can be used to access the most common functions: pressing the left or right arrow keys will load the previous or next picturee, respectively; pressing the < or > keys will move the film strip on the right backwards or forwards; pressing L will show the photo on black (it stands for “lightbox”), with the Escape key allowing to go back; pressing F will add the photo to the favorites (or remove it.)

If this weren’t enough, the Actions drop-down menu allows quick access to more than one would even need. It’s a breeze to quickly add the photo you’re watching, if it belongs to you, to sets or groups; or, if it belongs to someone else, to invite it to groups of whom you’re administrator. And if the need arises to change the description or the title, it’s enough to click on it right on the page, and the text will immediately become editable. And for small retouches, it takes two clicks to get to Picnik, which — despite its ridiculous name — is a nice in-browser photo editor. It’s not Photoshop, but for minor edits it can be a lifesaver.

It’s also very easy to get access to the complete EXIF information (it’s only takes one click on the camera name on the right side). DeviantArt, on the other hand, only grants access to a small subset of EXIF data, which is a shame. I learned a great deal of what I know about photography by studying those on Pbase, and I wholeheartedly recommend any new photographers to get into the habit of reading them, both on their photos and on those by others.

To summarize, this is why I love Flickr and why I recommend it to anybody interested in sharing their photographic work. They even make it a breeze to actually license photos for commercial purposes through Getty Images. For those who’ve been living under a rock, that’s one of the biggest stock photography agencies. Speaking of which, I know from first-hand information that most magazine editors seek pictures have stopped looking on Pbase and DeviantArt for fresh images to license; the former because it’s dying, the latter because the signal-to-noise ratio is going down very quickly. Flickr, on the other hand, seems to attract many talented photographers — some of whom routinely get published on big magazines — and many editors — who get them published.

And before you ask, I have no coupon for you. There is no affiliate program for Flickr. You can use most of its functions for free, with a few limitations. Once you hit them, it’s $25 per year. But trust me, it’s money well spent. Very well spent.

You can see my portfolio at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollino/. I update it daily and there’s a nice RSS feed, so feel free to stalk me there!