Luica’s Blog

My new favourite camera that I carry with me everyday.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think the Lomo LCA is really cool, but it’s getting expensive to buy slide film and difficult to find decent places which do a good cross-processing job without charging a small fortune.

My friend Bono introduced me to this brilliant piece of kit at my birthday party. Like Oscar Wilde, I can resist everything except temptation. The next day, I went to different shops to check out the camera, and the day after I ordered it for less than £250. I was well chuffed about getting it.

I know a lot of people complain about the noise when it’s above 200 ISO, which is actually a fair point. But I don’t like my Lomo LCA because it takes accurate photos, I like my camera because it takes interesting photos. The 28mm wide angle is so handy as it’s the same my LCA and I love the macro capability, which works really well in black and white. Of course, the Ricoh GR Digital looks great in black and the magnesium alloy body feels just right.

My second set of Moo Cards arrived Thursday!

Inspired by epmd’s project, I’ll be leaving these around London, Hong Kong and probably Tokyo. If you find them, I’d like to hear from you via the e-mail address printed at the back.

My Moo Cards arrived over the weekend! It’s such a brilliant idea to print out the mini stylized version of your photos from Flickr, so that you can use them as business cards, gift cards, invitations, etc.

The Moo printing service is pretty straight-forward and easy to use - if you have a Flickr account, you can simply import the photos from your account to Moo, before you select the ones you want to print. 100 pieces for £9.99 (excluding postage) in any combination of up to 100 different photos of your choosing.

Next, you are ready for the most time-consuming step - cropping. Not only will you have to make a decision on how to crop your beautifully composed photos, but the cropping tool on Moo isn’t very accurate (probably the only negative aspect I’ve experienced so far). It certainly took me a while to crop my selection of 50 photos!

Apart from Flickr, you can also make mini cards from Bebo, Second Life and Habbo.

I ordered my second set of Moo Cards today - can’t wait to see them in about a week’s time.

Half-way through the five-week class, we were back at the National Theatre and continued looking at some of our photos from the first and second week. Chad McCail was our guest lecturer, who seemed to have a lot of interesting things to say but wasn’t really given a great deal of chance to.

We spent most of the day going through everyone’s photos and making constructive suggestions on each other’s work. The conclusion was that I should focus on my shadow series, which was obviously showing a sense of absence through an intention of searching for someone or something, and I am happy to give it a go.

I am never very good at photographying architecture and still find it difficult to make them meaningful and give them a ’soul’, without any obvious object. I may try taking a series of photos at Bow Quarter and see what happens.

The second week of a five-week class on Photography, Art and Architecture was more fun than the first week. We spent a little too long looking at Diego’s photos before we moved to the National Theatre for evaluations on some of our photos from last week and practical work.

I really enjoy this class partly due to an interesting mix of our fellow students - a third of the people are architects while there are also a professional photographer, psychiatrist, PhD student of Fine Art and an investment banker. We are also from different countries: Spain, Romania, Denmark, Hong Kong and of course, England.

As Diego said, our differences were shown in the ways we see the same building. Some people were keen to capture the details and tend to be more graphical while the others were obsessed with the spiral staircase. I like taking photos of reflections - through windows or shadows.

We didn’t have long photographing the National Theatre and decided to come back again next week.

We were really looking forward to the first week of the Photography, Art and Architecture class at Saint Martin’s College. I started messing around with the LCA since I received it as a Christmas present years ago and I was lucky enough to have sold some of my photos, but I didn’t get serious about photography until I bought my first DSLR six months ago.

I thought joining a photography class would be an obvious thing to do but I didn’t want to spend £250 on a class about the technical details - the title of this class caught my eye. I had never taken much interest in photographing architecture before. I migth have taken photos of buildings back in Hong Kong, but they were never the focus.

It turned out that the lecturer, Diego Ferrari (I am not making this up!), is quite an interesting guy. An artist who is full of energy and enthusiasm. He seems to be doing really well, in terms of getting commissions and his work published. A half Italian, half Spainish, Argentina-born artist with a passion about arts and using photography as a medium to show a sense of space - it pretty much sums up the theme of this class.

We spend half of the day-long session looking at other artists and photographers’ work and the rest on practical work. We had to take pictures of the Saint Martin’s building in Holborn, which was not an easy task as the buiding is quite uninspiring and with the entire class (15 people) trying to capture every corner and looking for unusal angles for unique pictures - it was almost impossible.

I can’t wait for next week when we will be taking photos of the National Theatre on the southbank.

Some time in September, my ‘Copenhagen Airport’ photo was chosen by FILE Magazine. I was gutted to miss the opportunity to see my photo on the front page of the well-respected online photography magazine, but was pleased to see my photo chosen by the editorial team for the second time.

It’s my pleasure to be a contributor for this magazine.

After being a proud owner of a Lomo LC-A for more than four years, I finally made up my mind and bought myself a £24.99 medium format Holga 120GN from The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

My first roll of medium format film proved to be chaotic - we didn’t know how far the film should wind on before I started shooting; when I was finished with the 16 shoots, we had to use a pitch dark room to remove the film.

Numerous people asked me what sort of camera I was using as it was plasticy and looked more like a toy than anything. I patiently introduced them to the amazing concept of toy cameras and the unexpected outcome of the photos taken with a lomo or holga.

I am still waiting for my first roll of holga medium format to be developed - it costs £8.99 for 16 shots and takes two weeks to develop! I would appreciate if anyone can let me know of a cheaper/faster place to develop medium format films in London than Jessops.

It must be my lucky week! My ‘Brauhof Guy’ photo was chosen by FILE Magazine 24 hours ago and I realised that my ‘Shanghai Traffic’ photo was used by SciDev.Net for their China & Climate Change article.

It was great to see my photo on both websites and my credit next to it. Brad said he now understood why the traffic to my website had increased extensively in the last couple of days and I was so excited about it.

I can’t wait until we get to Berlin by the end of July when I can take some photos of a foreign country again. I wish I could take some nice images of London but it’s always more difficult to feel inspired by the city one lives in. I never used to find Hong Kong an exciting to take photo when I was living there but once I moved away from it, I found the city so compelling and full of interesting subjects.

Taking photos of the modern 40-floor building is interesting, but capturing the disappearing old and traditional industries is something completely addictive.