Some fun we had me and my friends in “Zaymov” park in Sofia, Bulgaria. I was photographing some portraits and landscapes when I came up with the idea to shoot something quirky, so I set up my tripod and photographed two of my friends in different positions and then blended the images in Photoshop.

1./ Milcho – rage against himself

2./ Spas ironising himself

I don’t have much insight about the story or his ideas on the movie. All I know is that he would play the protagonist (main character), an English man, and a friend of his would play the antagonist (secondary/opposite character), a Russian man. The idea about the poster was to make it in a ‘Sin-City style’. I am not a professional when it comes to graphic design and all that, but I do possess a very good knowledge of Photoshop, so I fiddled around with some photos of my friend and his mate, which I took at his home. As a final thing I decided to cut out both of them and paste them onto a city landscape, which wanted to create again from cut-outs.

For the final design I used a few blend mode changes and some easy filters applied to each layer, in order to give it that harsh black and white ‘sin-city’ look. Also I had to adjust the size of each layer, in order to have some sense of dimension. That was the hardest part of all for me – to adjust the size of each cut-out using the free transform, perspective and warp edit tools and move tool.

All the pros and going to start criticising I’m sure, but I don’t care, I did this for fun Enjoy!

Sin-City poster #1

Sin-City poster #2 (with text)
The original title is NOT going to be “BRATVA (Brotherhood)”.
I added this, because in my head that is how I pictured the characters and the story.

Nothing lasts forever as we all know. But why the desire to stay the same even if you see that life is constantly changing? Governments change, weather changes, nature changes, generations change, mentality patterns change, so why do we NOT want to change? I guess people are right when saying that “habits don’t die easily”.

Instead of trying to understand why things work the way they do, why can’t we just accept reality with its ups and downs and move on with our lives. Then disappointments, fears and doubts would just crumble to the ground and won’t be able to chain people down, like they do at the moment.

“Ако ще и бомба да падне, няма да се аз съм си аз”, или “остави утре ще свършим работа”. Това са няколко примера за начина, по който мислят на днешно време доста хора и въпреки, че снимките показани тук са направени в една и съща област, достигам до прозрението, че без значение къде отивам, характера и особеностите на хората са еднакви.

Нищо не е вечно както знаем. Но защо присъства желанието да стоим на едно и също място, вкопчили се в обичайния си сив начин на живот, въпреки че знаем, че живота се променя постоянно? Управления се сменят, времето се променя, природата се променя, поколенията се сменят, народопсихологий се променят, тъй че защо НЕ искаме да се променим? Народната приказка е вярна тогава, гласейки “навиците трудно се променят”.

Няма смисъл да се опитваме да разгадаваме начините на съдбата, нека вместо това да приемем реалността за такава, каквато е с всичките й качества и недостатъци и да продължим напред със съдбите си. Ако човек направи това вече няма да има разочарования, страхове или съмнения, ще бъдат строшени оковите на тези негативни качества, които ни държат приковани в момента.

God above all!
“Who build that cross over there anyway…?”
Господ над всичко!
“Кой беше постройл оня кръст там между другото…?”

“Good thing we got those new aluminium doors for the second floor.”
“Добре, че сложихме алуминиева дограма на втория етаж.”

“I still remember the days when the old stonemason factory used to work.”
“Помня едно време тая работилница все още работеше.”

“Time to get back to work.”
“Айде пак на работа.”

“Good thing we brought the child’s pushchair to carry the groceries with.”
“Добре, че взехме на детето количката да сложиме пазара в нея.”

“What are you looking at?”
“К’во ме гле’аш бе?”

“Is that your apartment on the fourth floor?”
“Това вашия апартемент ли е на четвъртия етаж?”

“So we are different, so what. What makes you better than me?”
“Различни сме и к’во толкова. С какво си мислиш, че си по-добър от мене?”

“Are we there yet?”
“Стигнахме ли вече?”

“Once so many people used to work there and now its just standing there in the middle of nowhere”
“Едно време работеха толко много хора там а сега само си стой в пустощта.”

“I remember there used to be a factory there once…”
Who cares anymore
“Имаше едно време завод там помня…”
Ама какво значение има вече

MAIDSTONE SUNSET

MARDEN SUNSET

MARDEN TWILIGHT

However these days I have started to realise my potential and recognise that if you want to achieve something, you have to constantly practice and evolve every day. Which I find hard to do, my mind gets very easily tired of doing just one thing and easily attracted to playing computer games, or watching random videos or movies over the internet. And that wastes my time so much that I don’t even realise it, and then I hate myself for having achieved nothing… Something quite common these days for people I have seen… The answer I guess is just to keep doing what I have to do – keep photographing, which improves my approach after each session, keep drawing and noting ideas down about animation and movies.

I promise that I will do better than what I do now!

So here are a few recent images I took, using my filters, which help give that professional look of the photo so much which I didn’t realise up to now. Enjoy!

I will start off with this image of our back garden. Here I used a Graduate Neutral Density 2 filter for the sky,
it was a really bright sunny day. Also I used a circular polariser filter,
which got rid of all the light reflections in the leaves and grass,
and also it kind of gets rid of a lot of that nasty white ultra-violet light.

Ahh, the “Peaceful sunset”. That’s how I named this one. Here I used my Graduate Neutral Density 2 (GND 2) filter again,
as well as my circular polariser filter. I knew that the polariser usually works for reflections,
so this time I decided to use it for any reflections from the waters.
It turned out that the polariser kind of enhanced the blues in the sky and waters
and also changed the colour range to more stunning colours.

“The red window”
This image I took on my way home after taking the image above (The peaceful sunset). I was instantly struck by it.
The old stone house, the twilight and the vivid red coloured window reminded me subconsciously of a scene from a horror movie.
Maybe it needs a bit more contrast, or darkening the edges or something like that in order to keep focus on the window.

And last but not least I think a nice image for a conclusion of this topic -
my “There is only one way – the way to God” image
(I need to fix the shadows on this one, they are too purple)

My idea for Glamour versus Anti – Glamour is my background. I come from a country where contrasts and differences amongst people, which could be striking to westerners, are normal and a way of life. I am talking about a Bulgarian post communistic society, influenced by a lot of American culture and one which is striving to become as “glamorous” and attractive as the American, or West European one. At least that is a widespread understanding, which does not necessarily put all Bulgarian people under the same category.

What I am trying to show and say here with my images is to try and bring some sense to those striving to become “glamorous”. The strength of Bulgaria as a geographic location is agriculture and it has been a main source of survival and living for the people for centuries. This is one of the roots of Bulgarian people. The main contrast at the moment is that we live in an age of technology, hence people tend to neglect and even tend to deny their family tree root. The purpose of my work is not to criticise, point the finger, or say right or wrong, on the contrary – when you try to explain a person a thing which he takes for granted or in this case even denies, this could bring some sense in him/her.

I was raised in the capital of Bulgaria – Sofia. I have never lived in the village, or had to survive/make a living from agriculture as it used to be before my father’s generation. But I and my brother spent almost every summer with my father’s parents at their village for a good couple of months. I was not made to do this, but to keep parental contact with our grandparents. We did not have to work or anything, we helped voluntarily with the agricultural work sometimes. Most of the time was spent “running freely through the fields”.

This experience proved to be a vital part of my maturity and character development. When you have to work for your dinner, or when you have to actually get out on the field and help with some agricultural work it really makes you appreciate the food you are eating, the bed you are sleeping in and what good (grand)parents you actually have caring for you.

And as a conclusion I would like to share this experience with others to help them understand the real meaning of knowing “where you come from” and “who you are”, and express my appreciation to my family about the life I had as a child and teenager. If I could turn back time, I would pick up a camera and start to take pictures from an early age up to these days and make a book about that whole experience…

I shot the images on 35 mm black and white film, then printed them traditionally in the darkroom and then made an acitate photocopy of each one, because I was experimenting with darkroom techniques, such as this one, liquid emulsion, cyanotype, sandwich printing and so on. And finally photographed the acitate images on top of my laptop screen, which acted as a light box, fixed them and added some colour to them in using Photoshop. So here are the final results:

The images I leave untitled -

…just wanted to say a few words about this image. It resembles the loss of the older generations to the modernification of the world, who were the direct link to the pureness of nativity with the younger generations, which prefer to get a technological based job and leave their old roots.

I’ll be mirror of Robert Frank for this brief.

The initial reason was because I found his work “The Americans” fascinating. Although it received negative responses from American critics and media in the beginning when it came out, later on this peace of work became one of the main elements in American documentary and art photography development. Frank initially received a grant for his photographic journey around the states, in order to document American post-war society. Plus the era marked the beginnings of the photographic journeys.

Why I liked Frank’s “The Americans” was because he photographed American people in the United States and Frank himself was not American. He was an immigrant actually, born in Switzerland and moved to the states to make a life and career for himself. His “outsider’s” perspective on American society, implied in his images, was totally criticised. His situation relates with my life. I come from another country and live in the United Kingdom. So despite me trying to stay as objective as possible, I can not help the fact sometimes that there is a big difference in my understanding of the culture here.

As a consequence the images I took of people in the urban environment in London are of impressions left on me of things, which otherwise would not necessarily impress a person brought up in London. I really liked the idea of incorporating these impressions that I had kept for a long time now, to bring another perspective on things. Like Robert Frank I could be criticised about the objectivity, or truthfulness of the situations photographed, however I am not trying to judge in this case. I am just a little alien, like an English singer used to sing, who sometimes does not know why the things which I see are happening in that particular way.

I have photographed a journey through London using different train and underground transport. I used a 35mm camera, no tripod and a 400 ISO black and white film. Nothing so technically special about it, just using the usual simple kit as an American street photographer from the 50s or 60s. I chose 400 ISO in order to have more freedom in low light as well as having a slight camera shake at the same time. Pin sharp focus was not important as I was not focusing on the detail, but the overall elements in the image frame.

After processing I noticed that in my attempt to stay objective, I realised that the idea I had about the pictures made the subjectiveness of the final images. I later decided for their presentation to experiment with them. So I chose the final ones and placed them on top of my laptop screen, which acted as a light box. Then photographed them to digital, imported them in Photoshop and inverted them so that they become positive. The final outcome was a surreal ‘CCTV like’ quality to them. The destructive quality added to them enhanced my surreal feelings about people using the train transport in London.

“Bitten” –

this building has always been in front of me on Canning Town station since I started commuting to University in 2007. But one day I noticed something strange about it. To me it looked like it had its side bitten in a strange circumstance. Obviously after few seconds I realised that it was getting demolished. Its not there any more…

“Tunnel” -

Every time I have to walk through numerous tunnels under or overground in order to reach my destination. Its Ok, I am used to it, but sometimes if I give it some thought, it becomes quite phobic or unsettling to know if walking on the streets of London, just the amount of people and the underground activity that is happening. This itself proves my feelings and the surrealness of the image.

“16:00″ -

Time and the clock become the ultimate invisible master that governs people’s activities and actions on the station. It is funnily strange to me how people do not stand up or move from their positions, or just do something about the “boring” time spent waiting for the train. You can not go to the toilet sometimes or something else, because the clock tells you your train has arrived and you have no time for it. So we deny our human nature – our primal needs and replace and oppress them because of a non existing governing rule…

“Girl?” -

On London Bridge station, where I used to get my train from, after I had a look at my train times, I walked down the stairs to the platform and saw this girl sitting at the bottom of the stairs. Here is where a cultural difference comes in the frame. (Not judging) In my home country people do not sit on ground surfaces, although I am used to it now, it is unusual for me to see people sitting on the ground or stairs. Although this sounds so hypocritical, I did not take the picture for that reason, I took it because despite not knowing this person, I felt an affiliation with them. Was she sitting there to wait for a friend, or because she was upset and did not care where she was sitting, or probably was heartbroken…?

I felt like asking her if she was Ok, or if she needed some company for a conversation, but did not have the guts for it. And I guess showing compassion towards others in the open seems weird in the times we live in. What do you think?

“Jeans” -

This photo was taken with the help of my friend Vladislav Tsenov. Ok this pretty much speaks for itself and you are probably having your time right now to have a laugh or to stare with confusion, but what the heck is wrong with some people. Am I being too judgemental about this? I know its the 21st century and we live in an age of free choice, but I mean, come on…its not cool to wear your kid’s clothes, because you want to combine baggy pants fashion with 80s slim fit jeans…

The Moon casts it’s light shadow

The Moon is jealous because of the Sun

They cross paths, but are too different to merge…

The Sun always sets alone.