Pingere cum luci, to paint with light...

Artists use different mediums to share their passion. Dancers use their bodies, moving around to express different ideas, painters use paints and brushes to make drawings on a canvas, sculptors can use different materials to carve out shapes, musicians use their instruments to make music, to move people, to take them through a range of emotions. A photographer uses his camera to shape light. Using the many different settings available to him, a photographer can manipulate light, allowing bright sunlight to trickle in through the aperture, or coaxing in every photon from a dark room, taking a quick shot of a running child, or taking his time to capture a flowing stream. That is pingere cum luci, painting with light.

On this blog, I will post pictures that I take, as well as my thoughts and reflections on my shots. Thank you so much for taking the time to look at, enjoy and comment on my work. I hope that, by reading my blog, you will come to appreciate photography as much as I do and, who knows, maybe even pick up a camera yourself.

-Karine Topalian

*Note: To see any picture in its original size, just click on it. When it opens, you can click to zoom in. Most of the time, you can also zoom in further (using Ctrl+scroll wheel on mouse) to see all the details of a larger image. Don't forget to zoom back out, so that your other web pages look normal when you return to them!

Monday, June 20, 2011

Untimely Philosophy

After trying to write up something intelligent, full of meaning, and deeply enriching, I decided not to. Really, there is no point. Sometimes, you just have to let the picture speak for you. 'A picture paints a thousand words', but sometimes it needs a bit of polishing to make a statement, someone to unite the thousand words into one, coherent, text. And sometimes not. Or, maybe, just maybe, 1 AM is not the time to be trying to weave anything remotely poetic.

What do I think this picture means? What are my thoughts and feelings about it? What do I want to say?

Ask me in 8 hours.


Toronto's High Park, at the end of April. The grass hadn't yet started to grow green, and the trees were still bare. While walking in the park, I came across this stairway leading nowhere, on which someone had spray painted 'Stairway to Heaven', but not in the right direction - an observation which can be argued. It seemed...interesting... that the stairway was directly beside a fallen tree, which gave it a nice artistic quality, with odd angles and shapes making it pleasing to the eye and to the mind, but at the same time having a disturbing, almost forgotten quality to it.

As to what the photo means, I won't say just yet what my point of view is. I am interested in seeing what you have to say. The comments are open...
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2 comments:

  1. Melissa G.Monday, June 20, 2011 11:29:00 AM

    I love all of your pics Karine :) you're simply amazing <3 'ask me in 8 hours' haha

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  2. AreenMonday, June 20, 2011 10:16:00 PM

    Hmm... Well if you look around the so called "stairway to heaven" you can see a dead forest and the stairway itself doesn't look like one who would take you to the golden gates.

    How I would see this is that the stairway doesn't actually go anywhere and what this would signify is that one must make his and her own values in an indifferent world. This would mean that life is not determined by a supernatural god or an earthly authority, but of what we choose to make of it during our existence.

    The forest around the stairs embodies the feeling of dread and anxiety felt by this complete self freedom. Some people seek for a purpose to life and can't stand this feeling of limitlessness or the 'oceanic feeling' as Freud puts it.

    Of course there are other countless interpretations of this picture but this is what I see when I look at it.

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