Ivan Makarov Blog

As we wrap up 2011 and enter 2012, I decided to look back at images I made in the last 365 days and pick my very favorites.

As I looked through the collection, I made over 30,000 exposures. However, it was a busy year in many other areas of my life, as we welcomed a new child into our family, and as I tried to focus on my health and on professional side of my life. In other words, I do wish I made more images. Good thing there’s always next year, right?

In terms of my direction last year, I gravitated heavily towards black and white images. I included few color images in the end – but mostly because these are family photographs. I can’t exclude them even if they mean more to me than they mean to others. The pictures I take of my family have as much meaning as anything else I capture with my camera.

Without further adieu, here they my favorite images from 2011. As you take a look through these, I’d love to hear which are your favorite.

San Francisco Summer

Profile of San Francisco

The Arrival of the April Storm at Big Sur

Waiting

A to B

In Hermitage

Elektrozavodskaya Station

New Beginning

Ukraine Kiev Temple

Where I Belong

New Life

Family

Innocent Joy

A bit of a background. Few years ago like most of you I was very active on Flickr. The community was great there and we got together several times and published our own magazine, and a few books focused on photography. Below is a sample of that effort. I had my photos in there, so did+Thomas Hawk , +Ingo Meckmann , +Jerry Lorengo , +Jeremy Brooks and many others. We also wrote articles, interviews, shared photo essays and so forth.

We never did it for profit. The main goal was to see each other’s work in print, which is a whole different experience than seeing it on a monitor. As a result, I still have those books and memories. Loved the result of those efforts.

Last week we decided to do this again. The majority of photography community seemed to moved to Google+. It’s hard to name an active photographer today who doesn’t have a presence there.

Except this time, we decided to do this for charity and give back. We’ll publish two versions of the book – a hard copy version through Blurb, and an electronic ebook for those who don’t feel they need a hard copy. All proceeds from the sales will be donated to charity.

The process of putting the book together is well under way, and we have 217 photographers who signed up for the project, some are very well known today, such as Lotus Caroll, Thomas Hawk, Joel Tjintjelaar, Jim Patterson, Patrick Smith, Brian Day and others who are less known. We hope the project will be completed by the end of January.

If you want to join in, it’s not too late. Leave a comment on the post here, as participation is open to photographers of all levels. We also set up Google+ page to help you follow the progress and participate if you have the time.

Here’s an image I made few weeks ago while shooting sunrise at Treasure Island together with Steve Landeros.

There’s something about quiet big city that is so calming.
 

My apologies if you’re a regular visitor to this blog.

I’ve been redoing the blog and how it’s structured, including design and posts. Some of the content is going to disappear as well. The easiest way I know of how to work on the changes is in the live mode. So bear with me. I promise, soon all should be back to normal – even if with a new look.

A rework of an older color image I posted. Took a look at it in B&W, and decided I like this more.

Which one do you like?

You can see the set from Embarcadero Center here. I have a few more images to share from archives later this week.

It’s been the longest time since I uploaded a new photograph online, ever since I started shooting back in 2007. I’ve blogged about the slump in one of my earlier posts.

Either way, it’s great to be shooting again. This was taken last Sunday as the new spring storm was arriving to the West Coast. It’s been wet since then. While not a new composition for me, I wanted to shoot a B&W version from here, with these heavy clouds and an opening right over these rocks.

Yesterday my family and I decided to drive down to Point Lobos State Reserve. We love that park and haven’t been for a while. The weather was great, warm and partly cloudy. I think Point Lobos is one of the gems on all of the West Coast. It’s perfect for easy hiking as a family, it’s never too crowded, and within a mile there are all kinds of things to see – trees, tide pools, wildlife, small coves with sand and rocks. It’s no wonder it was one of the favorite spots to photograph and just to be at for the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Imagine my surprise when we got there yesterday around 6pm and were told the park will be closing in 30 minutes. Why? Because of the budget cuts. It turns out the new hours have been in affect for a month now.

We’ve all heard about the budget cuts in the state of California and proposal to close various parks around the state. Some are now at reduced hours. But did they really have to cut Pt Lobos hours? What is the more popular spot in that part of California? Furthermore, with Big Sur road being shut down  during the day due to road repairs (before one even gets to Bixby Bridge), there’s not much else to do there.

What they essentially did  with those reduced hours was cut off the best two hours for photography at Point Lobos. A good portion of all their visitors are photographers who will now have no chance to photograph at Pt Lobos at sunset. I’ve always felt it unfair that the park wasn’t open until 9am, thus having its doors closed for sunrise. But now the policy extends to sunsets as well.

In fact, not just the photographers – all of the visitors now do not have the opportunity to enjoy the sunset at one of the most beautiful places on earth. I know a couple at my church that got engaged there years ago during one of those sunsets. Now no one will have the opportunity to see Point Lobos in its best light.

If funds are tight, wouldn’t it have been easier to keep the park closed till noon every day? Who comes to Pt Lobos early in the day anyway? Or perhaps close the park during earlier hours during the week, but keep the hours to what they used to be on weekends.

I must say I’m very disappointed with this new policy. I hope it doesn’t last long, because I don’t have much interest to photograph at Pt Lobos during broad daylight.

This thought is especially relevant on the day I mailed the check for my California taxes. I really wish it’d go to making the beauty of my state accessible to me as a resident.

I’ve been going through a bit of a slow period with my photography in the past couple of months. I have not been shooting much, and it’s for various reasons. I’d like to just say I’ve been so busy with other things – but it’s not just that. Sometimes we all go through periods when we’re reevaluating our priorities when it comes to life, work, family, and art. That’s been my case. I think I’ve been thinking too much.

To help me battle those daemons that have been forcing me to keep my camera down, I decided to start an exercise that got me into photography – taking photo a day (or more). Last time I did this, I lasted for about 140 days and gave up. It was too much stress. But my photography improved greatly during that time.

I have lots of people whose work I follow who post pictures every day – for example, Thomas Hawk, G Dan Mitchell, Jeremy Brooks. Some of them don’t take pictures every day, but a common factor that unites their work is that they post pictures regularly.

I’d like to get back to making photography a bigger part of my life, namely, taking more pictures. And I’m not going to stress as much about the subject matter, or if I’m doing it for a project. The main purpose of this exercise would be to visually document my life.

The other day I was watching a documentary on big wave surfers. The big waves come very rarely for them – maybe one or two weekends during the whole winter, if that. One thing that caught my attention is that they have to stay in best shape regardless if they want to stay alive in those huge 100-foot waves. So they regularly hit the gym, and surf smaller waves.

I’m still trying to find projects to shoot that I’m passionate about. Some of these projects I can’t work on regularly. I find no interest in shooting Big Sur during boring weather. I can’t shoot some of the buildings I want to shoot because I’m not close to them. But this shouldn’t stop me from going out and shooting other things, if just “to stay in shape,” like these surfers.

I expect that most of these “photo a day” pictures will be taken with an iPhone, like the one above taken this afternoon in Utah. But it’s more about the exercise, than the content One thing I’m learning – it’s a lot easier to find creativity in our lives when we’re working on creating something new every day, even if it’s something as insignificant as pictures taken with an iPhone. At the same time, I’ll continue to work on my other, more focused photography projects.

I started a blog “IM Daily” where I will post these images I take every day. Here is the link – http://im-daily.tumblr.com/ It has RSS feed if you wish to subscribe this way. Also, if you’re on Instamatic, feel free to add me – my user name is “Ivan Makarov.”

Not yet sure where this journey will take me, but I’m exited to start.

I recently ordered a canvas image wrap from Canvas on Demand for a friend. The picture is the one of the Oakland Temple, which has not been cropped, so the native resolution of it is 4:6, but the option we ordered was 16:20, which means some cropping would have to occur to fit the image.

What did COD do? Here an email I got this morning.

Hi [..],

Regarding your recent order, the image that you submitted does not fit the exact proportions for the size of canvas you have chosen. In order to assure a good fit, we are going to make your canvas a custom size of 16×24 instead of 16×20. We will do this at no additional charge to you. Our goal is for you to be completely satisfied with the finished product, so we just wanted to keep you informed of this modification. We will get started immediately. We will do a great job for you!

CanvasOnDemand.com reference #[..].

Thanks!

And that’s what I can an outstanding customer service.

Last week I decided to jump on the iPad bandwagon, and get the newly released Apple iPad 2. Here are some of my initial thoughts after spending most of the weekend playing with it.

Why I Finally Bought One

When the first iPad came out, I wasn’t all that excited about it. I felt it was overpriced, and lacked cool features I thought it would have (camera, Flash support, etc.). I couldn’t justify paying $600-1000 for what seemed to be a giant iPhone. Plus, most photographers were screaming – “perfect way to carry your portfolio with you”, and I just didn’t see it. Nothing substitutes a good web-site, and also fine prints.

But then three things happened.

First, I bought a Kindle 3. There’s no better way to read books. I can download a book I want to read within seconds (and a lot of them are available for free). I can also carry hundreds of them together  the same time. Since I bought Kindle, I couldn’t stop reading. Kindle converted me to portable readers. What I loved the most about it was that it was so light that I never noticed any extra weight in my work bag.

Second, I played with iPads that some of my friends have and absolutely loved the whole experience – browsing pictures, reading news, playing games and so forth.

Third, since iPad first came out, over 50,000 apps were created for it. Some of the popular iPhone apps (which is nice, as I’m not an iPhone user), and other cool ones. A lot of them are free. Apps is the future of personal computers, and especially tablets and phones. I know as a Blackberry user. Love the phone – hate its software and its apps.

Getting an iPad 2

I went to the Oakridge Mall not far from my house in San Jose. I got there around 3pm – which was 2 hours before the official launch at 5pm. The line already had about 150 people there. Quite a few people in the line were playing with their original iPads. How genius is Apple – people are upgrading to iPad 2 because they love their original one so much.

The line was an interesting experience too. Local retailers popped up often with free gifts – such as snacks with coupons to their stores. Local restaurants were also passing the menus and delivering food to people in the line. Apple was not the only one making money from its fanboys. The experienced people brought chairs. I didn’t, but will remember that next time.

The line started moving at 5pm, and did so quite fast. I got into the store around 6.30pm and was able to get the model I wanted – 3G 32 Gb Verizon version, although I did want AT&T, and they were out of all AT&T models by then. Comparing to what I heard about iPhone 4 launch, the line wasn’t as long, but still I’m certain Apple store sold all the iPads they got delivered to them (probably at least a 1,000 of them). The estimate says Apple sold at least 400,000 of these devices over the weekend.

I’m glad I went to the store instead of ordering online. Right now Apple’s web-site is showing 3-4 weeks delivery times.

What I loved about iPad

I’ll mostly use the iPad for two things – (1) catching up with news and (2) sharing it with my kids.

I spend at least an hour or two every evening reading news, browsing the blogs I follow, looking at pictures, and catching up with my social circle on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. There’s simply no easier and funner way to do it than on an iPad. There are great apps to do that. Flipboard just blew my mind away. It transforms all the important sources of information (social networks, or blogs, or bigger news sites) into a newspaper one can flip. News, tweets, blogs look so much better this way. Twitter for iPad is also the best way I found to use Twitter. It’s much faster and more interactive than any tools I used on a big computer. I loved TweetDeck. Now that I tried the Twitter app on iPad, I don’t ever want to use Twitter any other way. Photos also look so much better on the iPad screen they they do on my PC or even large iMac screen. iPad has one of the best screens I have ever seen in terms of how it handles contrast, color and rich blacks.

Then there are games. I’m not much of a gamer – last time I owned a game console was in mid-90s. But there are plenty of educational apps/games I can play with my kids and interact with them. It’ll be fun to spend more time with my kids this way.

Kids are also excited for our next road trip and airplane trips. Now they get 10 hours of movies on one battery charge. Plus, we can plugin in the iPad into the cigarette charger in our car without any problem. The screen on the iPad is much bigger than on any average DVD player, and we don’t have to shell out $2,000 for the system in the next car we’ll be buying just to get a DVD screen that is smaller in size and nothing even close in resolution to the HD quality of an iPad.

Finally, I do plan to use it for my photography portfolio when meeting with clients, and it’s nice that iPad 2 now comes with HDMI adapter. I frequently meet with clients in their homes, and it’d be nice to be able to blow up my portfolio on their HD TVs, right there in their living room.

Besides the apps and the whole experience, I also loved how light and slick iPad 2 is. The first version seemed a bit clunky when I compared it to Kindle 3. This one while weights the same, due to its redesign, feels very similar to my Kindle – small, light and very easy to hold.

What I didn’t like about iPad

The Smart Cover Apple created works just like they show in Apple videos. But I don’t know how effective it is. We’ll see if it sticks when I put an iPad in the bag. Also, it won’t protect the back of an iPad which I expect will get scratched with heavy use. I am thinking of abandoning it for a more standard leather cover that will cover both front and back.

Typing is not practical on an iPad. By that, I mean typing anything longer than 140 characters. My fingers still want me to feel the buttons. I’ll never want to compose a blog post on it. I will eventually buy a collapsable bluetooth keyboard for when I travel so I can leave my laptop at home.

My kids love it as much as I do. iOS is designed perfectly for a 3 year old, and my son can now operate it as well as I can. Even my 1 year old, who is typically not into computers loves how interactive iPad is, even for someone of her age. As a result, I have to fight for the iPad with my little ones when I’m home.

Overall

Otherwise, I love it. Those of you who own a Mac know that Apple products just work. It’s certainly the case with the new iPad. The internet is a whole new experience.

If you haven’t yet spend any time playing with an iPad – be careful. Once you do, you just may want to get one.