All right, listeners, welcome back to the three by two photo cast. I'm Martin fell, joined by Jason Burke. We're here to talk about photos that we love. And, yeah, not really a review show. If you listen to the first episode, you know what we're talking about. If not, go back, you'll find out. This is just really talking about photos that we love. Two co hosts, three photos each. That's the three x two photocast. So as we talk about them, check the links and show notes, and you'll find the photos that we're talking about today. So, Jason, I'll go first.

Yeah, please kick it off.

Perfect. Now, there's a bit of pressure, actually trying to find photos that you love to talk about this show, because I'm constantly appreciating, bookmarking things on glass, seeing things on micro blog, looking at other photo sites. So a bit of pressure here. But the first one that I chose is by a photographer I love on glass. I don't know him personally. I don't know him particularly well. I just know that I've commented on some of his photos before and, you know, had little discussions. And his name is Richard Stewart. Now, this is an untitled photo. Check the links in, show notes, as I said. But it's a street image of what appears to be a man deep in thought behind, I think, a train or a bus window. And this image, it's such a consistent style that Richard has. He uses quite often an Om system, om five varied lenses. And he has this great kind of talent for spotting these kind of cold, lonely, and very isolated street or transport situations. And when I say cold or lonely, I don't really mean that negatively. But I feel like it's this beautiful representation of what it's like to live in the city. And looking at this photo, like, you've got this kind of faded or sort of translucent effect. You can get an impression of what this man looks like, but he's framed beautifully by the design of this transport through the window. You've got this red diagonal line along the bottom to kind of contrast with the rest of it. This really kind of warm counterpoint to the rest of the photo. And I'm kind of left wondering, who is this guy? What's he thinking about? What are his troubles? And yeah, I'd recommend just looking at Richard's photos because you see this great kind of representation of city life in Japan. What did you get from this, Jason?

Sorry, hold on one sec. I'm just following them on glass now because this is amazing. I love this. I love everything about this.

It's great. Great style. I love it.

You could not have picked a better first photo to start with. Wow. This is just.

Thank you.

As soon as I saw it, I immediately thought movie poster with, like, a cool movie title. And it just has that vibe to it and the coldness and the darkness. I agree that sounds like that's somehow a negative thing, but it's really not. It really sets, like, a moment in time kind of feeling. And it's a still photo, obviously, but there's a sense of motion. That red line is doing so much here for me. It's got motion. It's got vibrance. It's just awesome. And then you have sort of the kind of diverging lines that are on. I think it's like a. Probably a backpack or some kind of bag that the person is holding in the. It's a train, I believe it looks like. And so you have those two, like, green lines jutting out from the red. There's just so much about it that just feels like I'm there. I really, really appreciate this. And it's also one of those that, you know, it's not staged. Cause it's a train. It was a quick capture moment in time, and it just feels profound.

Yeah, I agree with everything that you said, and I don't know if he's considering the ethics of his portraiture when he's walking around, but the way that he obscures people in a lot of the photos, like you said, it captures that moment in time, but kind of doesn't give you fully identifiable feel of who the person is. It's more about their situation or where they are situated. So, yeah, I don't assume he's going up and asking permission of everyone that he's photographing, but it's, like, in the composition that he's choosing and that distance and that kind of obscuring or that inclusion of, like, those digital artifacts, there's a distance there. Like, he's not really with them. You're observing them from afar. So I feel like it's incidental ethics in photography. Oh, with that.

Interesting. Yeah, that is a good point. It also. It leads me to want to know more, which I think is something that a great photo will do for you, is make you want to know what was happening an hour before this, what happened an hour afterward. What was this person like? What were they doing today? I just. I want to know more about this story of this person.

Yeah, it leads to a lot of questions. Yeah.

Great pick.

Anyway, thank you. I've already got my on the clock because we've got so much more to talk about. So should we go to your first one?

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So my first is from Mike. M A I Q U E. Some of you may know him already in his photography. It's prolific indeed. I picked one that is titled the old pastel gas station. I think as we go on with this show, you will begin to probably be able to pick out themes of Martin and myself. Photographic styles that we appreciate.

Yeah.

And one for me is punchy colors, as well as things that are in some almost kind of state of decay. Whether it's been abandoned or destroyed in some way or just that kind of. It's lived a life that has many stories behind it. And this photo does that in many ways. It has bright, punchy. You know, it's right in the title, pastel. It immediately just makes me think, like, seventies Miami or something to that effect where the colors are just. You would not see colors like that traditionally. Today, in most places that you go, most things are fairly boring architecturally, from a color standpoint. And so when you see things like this, you know that it was either done by somebody that has incredible care and artistic ability, or it's from another time. And this truly feels like another time to me. I love the. It's not wide angle, but it almost has that sort of wide angle effect of the middle sort of bulging out, even though I think it's just the nature of the angle of what the structure is. But, yeah, that just. These colors are just incredible. And I would love to see this in person.

Yeah, this is a cool choice. And I love following Mike's photos online as well. He's. Yeah, as you said, prolific. And like you said, it looks wide angled, but you can't really notice any horrible distortion or curving. All of these straight lines are maintained even when you look to the right in the background. With that other kind of empty or decaying building, it just looks kind of perfect. I love the people at the back left who give a sense of scale as well. But I think what I admire most about this photo, you know, if I think about, if I had been standing there, I don't think I would have taken it this way. And that's not a criticism. It's just I probably would have been tempted. I need to have this on an angle to create some sort of line going diagonally through the photo. But he's boldly stood right in front of it and let it dominate the picture. And everything else in the background is giving you the sense of scale alongside its kind of emphasis at the front. So I think the fact that he's gone front on is kind of more unorthodox.

Yeah.

Like, I wouldn't have done it that way.

Yeah.

And I admire it.

And again, it makes me wonder, what is slash was this building? It has a sense of automobiles going around it for some reason, with some kind of person in the middle doing something. It's not immediately obvious and it makes me just want to know more.

Yeah. Is it like a service station where they made you walk a long way to the building? Yeah.

I don't know. I'm not sure. It just. Again, it just leads to more questions, which I love.

Nah, that's awesome. Anyway, check the links in the show notes if you haven't seen that, listeners. Now, this is another person I love to follow on glass. Her name is Jenny Herald and unless I'm mistaken, she actually lives in Berlin. Was an instant kind of draw card for me, because I love Berlin and I visited a few times and did kind of language course over there years ago. It's just a cool city and I love Germany. But this particular photo was one that she took at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. It's a different city and it's a photo from above, presumably from a mezzanine or a balcony looking down at a person waiting for a concert to start. And what instantly stood out to me about this photo was the fact that it is incredibly three dimensional, with all the stairs and the railings that are included and the angles, but it also feels completely flat. So it's like the choice to make it black and white. The composition that she chose, it's this kind of. I don't know, is it Escher? With all of the impossible.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

Staircase.

Almost like an Escher painting as a photo.

Yeah, yeah. And the person there, you could have excluded the person and it still would have looked cool, but again, you don't have that sense of place or location scale. And it just kind of feels like, are they walking upstairs in a moment or downstairs? It could actually go either way. So it's a beautiful kind of illusion as a photograph. And again, this kind of respectful portrait of a person that doesn't identify them, but really lets them tell the story of what's going on and where they are. It's a great kind of portrait and architectural piece.

And the wood, how you can see each individual plank of the wooden floor and the wooden. Where the handrails are, those stairs that are sort of in the mid. Across the middle. If you look on the right side of them, they sort of look like they're going up. And if you look on the left, they're kind of going down. I think they're going. Well, actually, I really, genuinely don't know. I think they're going up, but it's a very good kind of optical illusion of what's going on here. Or are they just completely flat and there's lines on the floor? Who knows?

Yeah. And that blank space up the top, it's like this void. Yeah, but, yeah, sorry, continue.

No, no, I was going to talk about that next. Where you have this stairs that now are going to. We don't know, because that, I think, ceiling up there is blocking, obscuring our view of what's beyond the stairs. So now, again, I'm left with, like, what is up there? Are they going toward the event? Away from it? And you mentioned the person there down in the bottom left. I think if they weren't there, this would be incredible. Still, it would just be great with so many lines. Oh, and also, before I lose track of thought, everything is a very harsh angle, except the handrails and that one pole. Everything else is a very distinct line. But then there's just these two kind of round objects there that just feel. They just feel like they're being encroached upon by all of these harsh lines. That person with their stance, with their hands behind their back, it just makes me think. Waiting. They're waiting. They're almost pacing. When is this gonna start? I guess I'll go back up these stairs or down these stairs, whatever direction may be. But I think that adds a lot to just the feeling of what's going on here.

You're right. And maybe I didn't actually think of that. And that might be one of the reasons that I really like this photo. I'm an incredibly impatient person. Like, I don't think I'm rude, but when I'm waiting for something, I show it physically. Like, I feel it viscerally. And I'm a serious pacer. And there's nothing that makes me kind of twitch more than when you're arriving late to a show and there's some sort of siren or thing telling you, you know, like a kind of tone on the speakers. Like, get in the venue right now. They have that at the Sydney Opera House, which I suppose would be the australian equivalent to this venue. And it sends, like, down my spine to hear that do do do to get in, and I'm just like, I can't bear it. So there's an anxiety in this photo as well.

So that's you pacing back and forth.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Sweating.

Yeah. We'll call this a Martin self portrait. Yeah.

I'll just insert myself into that story. Sounds good, but no. Great photo, Jenny.

Very good, Jenny. Yeah. Again, another glass follow for me. This is going to be great for my glass feed, too. I'm going to get so many new things to follow. I love that. All right, number two for me, this is also a glass photo. If you can't tell, we're on glass a lot. We're finding photos from all over.

Yeah. And it won't be the whole show, but, yeah, definitely convenient.

We'll try to spread it out, but there's just. There's a lot of really good stuff on there.

So.

Yes. My next number two is from Scott Hacker, and it is titled Barge Ladder. This was a recent one, I think you mentioned it was hard to pick photos, Martin. It really is. Especially for the first episode. I think ideally I'm going to try to pick stuff from that month if possible, but this has been like, hey, pick something from the last 40 years for the. The first episode. So it was tough.

That's a good idea. We should do that.

Yeah. So this is from Scott Hacker. It's called barge ladder. And this is the side, like it says, side of a barge. That's a ladder. But when you hear barge ladder, you have a certain idea of what a ladder is in your mind, and then you see this and you think, well, that is certainly not at all what I was expecting to see when you said ladder. It is this. It is a very close up side of a ship with some great. Just lines in general. So the bottom of the ship is this. Well, one point, probably brightish red, which is now a kind of burnt orange looking from being in the water and having rust and all kinds of things on it. It has a great vertical white stripe up the middle, which also, again, has rust and just sort of stuff on it. So it's a very yellowy brown now instead of the nice crisp white that I'm sure it was when it was new. And then on. Flanked on both sides is presumably it was a black. It's got some. Some battle scars on it, so it is weathered and gray and just has a bunch of stuff on it. So just the overall image itself is just cool from like a. It's seen some stuff kind of standpoint. And then right up the middle are these ladder rungs, which are, you know, you can only fit 1ft or one hand on each one, and they're offset, but they're horizontal bars set inside of circles. And it's just. It's a very odd thing to see as a. Again, thinking about, oh, what's a ladder look like? Well, of course, it can't just be jetting out the side. It's gotta be, you know, inside, so it's not getting hung up on stuff. But it's just a very interesting visual thing for me that these ladder rungs are inside of these circles running up this white strip. And then also something else you'll learn about me as we go through this. I love things that have edge tension. So either something is like right at the edge of a frame, but not quite out, and that one of the rungs on this ladder is doing that exact thing, meshing between the white and the red. And I just. I think it's great.

So how do you feel, just before I say anything about the photo, how do you feel when you see something like, you know, when there are phone lines underground and you've got that kind of. What is it? Like a manhole or something that you lift, but then it might be painted, like half of the footpath or painted backwards. They take it out and they put it back.

Yeah.

How do you feel about that?

All I want to do is fix every single one of those I ever see, especially when they are. So if they're, what, like 90 degrees off, it's very clear. They just didn't care. But when they're, like three degrees off, it's like, oh, come on, you were right there. You almost got it back perfectly, and then you didn't. Yeah, I want to fix all of those anytime I see one.

Okay, so that's. That's past, like, the threshold of acceptability?

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Okay, well, good that we got that out of the way. We know for future episodes if something like that pops up. But, yeah, Scott's photo, I think this is great as well. And I think the fact that you pointed out that it's an odd kind of thing with the ladder within the circles, those little horizontal rungs, that's what makes the photo interesting. And the fact that, I don't know if Scott was on a photo walk deliberately or he just noticed this when he was just doing something on the way somewhere, but it's the sort of thing that you can imagine people might just walk past. It's just part of the setting or where you are, but he's noticed these shapes are strange. And so you take something that's probably quite mundane or just part of an area, and then chosen to compose and highlight it. So I think this is a classic example of what we enjoy about photography, which is the noticing of stuff. And it might sound wanky to people because taking a photo is much easier than painting something, but half the fun, at least, is noticing something, framing it, and then letting other people see it. So I think that's what Scott's done.

Really well here, and I'm sure this happens to you, too. You'll be walking along with whoever, and you have your camera, and you'll just flat out stop and then stare at a fence for a while and take photos of a fence. And people are just looking like, what's over there? And that's actually happened to me before. I'm trying to take a picture of something. I don't even remember what it was like a sewer grate something. And because I had this, you know, quote unquote big camera, it must have been something really remarkable that I was looking at. And the person came over and they're like, oh, my God, what's going on? What are you looking at? And I was like, oh, just this. This sewer grate had this one vent piece that was kind of bent in a weird way, and I thought it looked kind of neat. And they just look at you like your head was spinning. And I could understand that coming from the other side, but, yeah, I think finding the interesting in the seemingly uninteresting is what makes photography so fun.

Yeah, but it's often the photo that makes that thing interesting or the focal point. Yep, that person was probably right in the context of everything. It's like, what the hell's that? But when you see the photo, you go, oh, that is odd, because you've purposely composed it that way. So, yeah, great one. I'm going to move to my last one now. And we've coincidentally chosen a photo by the other person. So I've chosen a photo from you and you've chosen a photo from me. I think we're going to surprise each other, but here we are. So this is a photo by none other than Jason Burke. And I don't think we'll make a habit of this, because it's really more about other people's photos.

No, I don't think so. This was a coincidence that this happened this way. I think I was going to do it as a joke to you and that you did it back to me at the same time. So clearly we're on the same wavelength.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is a photo that you took in what I presume is an underground walkway at a train or subway station or pedestrian area. Yeah. So it's in Edmonton, Canada on your Burke photos site. And it just stood out to me when I was looking at some of your photos. You've got a lot of nice photos, but the fact that it's this empty kind of liminal space, you've got the lights overhead kind of leading your eyes towards the end. These beautifully spaced out kind of geometric shapes in the tiles. It just looked like. It doesn't look so dim and dark and mysterious that it's kind of this deliberately over edited image. I think you captured what I assumed to be the reality of the situation. When I walk through this, I will see the same thing. So it feels moody and liminal. But I believe you that this is what it looked like and that's why it stood out to me.

You're absolutely correct. Actually, it more or less looked exactly like this. And I stumbled upon this on accident. I think it was actually closed for some kind of maintenance or something. Like the trains were not running but somehow I ended up going into a door that they had not blocked or whatever. So I ended up in this underground. Yeah. Passageway. And I can't. This. There was a. Again, you don't know what else, what's not in the photo. I do because I was there. Behind me in this photo was a long ramp going down to this. And as soon as I landed at the bottom of that ramp and just saw this, it was like, whoa, that looks really cool. So I started taking a bunch of photos of that and then the other way and different angles and the straight on, I felt like it gave the best representation of this length and emptiness of the place. And those crazy tiles on the side that like kind of turquoise blue. Just beautiful. And it's one of those kind of, you know, out of the way beautiful objects that walking above that on the street, you would never know it was there. And I just, I thought it was like a really neat kind of treasure chest to find as I stumbled into this weird place that I didn't know about.

No, it's great. And like I said, I like the honesty of it because sometimes you see photos that look overly edited or have. I don't want to have a go at things like film simulations because they're a great feature of things like Fuji cameras. But I tend to prefer photos that show more of the reality of it. Maybe you can bring more of the coldness or the warmth out of the mood in your editing, but I don't like it when it's too harsh. This feels real to me. So good on you.

And this felt like one of those things where if there were a bunch of people in here, or even one or two, I really don't think it would have the same effect. So it was actually very fortunate that this was closed down and no one was technically supposed to be in there.

Cool. Well, it worked well.

All right, shall we go to my number three?

Go for it.

My number three is from a photographer named, let's see, Martin Feld on glass.

Oh, that guy.

Yeah, pretty good, actually. Give me a chance. Let me. Let me sell you on this. The title is noisy bat. So already I'm intrigued by the fact that it's called noisy bat. And what I love about this. Well, there are many things, but let me start with the first one. A. The bat's shape is awesome. I love everything about the way that the wings are down. It's still. But feels like it is moving forward. And it has that great bat wing, just kind of generic bat wing shape with the arches. It's just really cool. I love that it's at, like, ISO 25 million. I think that's great because that gives it this, like, nosferatu film grain feel. As soon as I saw this, I immediately thought, 1932, Nosferatu, the film, like this is him flying away out of a window or something. And because of that crazy high contrast and the. The focal length of a million millimeters, everything compounded together to just give it this old filmy feel, it felt like one of, you know, this was. This was the first photo of a bat ever taken by somebody in the early days of photography. And that's just what it felt like. And I just love it. It's so simple. It's just one bat in the center. The only other participant in this image is the kind of artifacting of just, I assume, the fact that it's ISO. You know, what is it, 25,000. So you're going to get some. You're going to get noise, you're going to get all kinds of crap in there. But it lends to the photo so well, especially because it's all behind the bat. If it were in front of the bat, I. I don't know, but I feel like that would. That would impede on just how much I like it, because I feel like then the bat feels like it can't go anywhere. But now it feels like it's trying to almost get away from something. So, yeah, I really like it. When you posted this the first time, I messaged you and was like, can I please have the, like, original, non uploaded version of this image, please?

And you sent it to me.

So thank you.

Look, I appreciate how complimentary you are, because I'm going to be totally honest here. This photo came out of my repeated failure to photograph bats in the way that I have wanted near our house. Right. So, particularly in summertime with daylight saving, we get these absolute clouds of bats coming from a nearby forest kind of reserve, and they fly over our house, just over the suburbs, and it's amazing to watch, but they come just as you're getting that last light, just as that sunshine is peeking behind our mountain escarpment. So you're losing light very quickly. And so you're trying to capture these fast moving animals in the sky with decreasing light. And quite often, because it was a pretty overcast summer for us, warm but overcast. You had these puffy clouds which were reflecting the remaining light that was coming from the other side over the escarpment. So the grain and that kind of noise you're talking about. Yes. It's that high ISO that I've used, but it's also capturing that slight color difference of the clouds in the puffy clouds.

Okay.

And then you throw on top of that that you've got this not optimal aperture at the extended range of the zoom of this 100 to 400 millimeter, which is, in equivalent full frame terms, 800 mm, because it's micro four thirds. Then you look at the fact that it's actually f 13.0 because I've got a teleconverter on there that doubles that.

Yeah. This feels like you shouldn't have been able to get anything with those kinds of numbers. But it's great. I love it.

Yeah. So I thank you, and I'm glad that you like it so much because I've kind of learnt to accept, you know what, maybe don't get the photo that you intended to get. Maybe it's actually bad. But through this repeated failure, I've got some interesting results. So I suppose maybe this sounds a bit silly or cheesy or wanky, but maybe not. It's like, just embrace your failures, do something different. And if it's not what you expect to get, put it up and someone might like it. It might be Jason.

Yeah, absolutely. And I will stop gushing about this, but I just. I just really this is like right up my alley. Thank you.

I'm glad you like it so much. And I've learned to just accept, you know what? Take what you get. You're not going to be perfect. Share the results, see what happens. Well, there we go. That's six photos. I've had fun.

This has been great. The format works, I think. I mean, we'll hear what people have to say.

Yeah. And make sure to check the links and show notes for all of the photos that we've discussed. If you want to check out our photos. But that again, even though we've ended the episode this way, it's not so much the focus. You can check us out on glass. I'm Martin Feld. On glass. Are you Jason Burke or Burke?

I think I'm just Burk. B u r K. I'll put links in the show notes for sure.

Thanks so much. Catch you next time.

See you next month.