Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

Part of the "Ollos Que Non Ven" exhibition - a series of portraits of people affected by the Spanish preferred stock (preferentes) scandal.
see Ollos Que Non Ven

This was one of the first photos I took with my Canon 20D back in 2008.
Una de las primeras fotos que hice con mi Canon 20D en 2008

Desperate for some sort of mini-project on a recent visit to the islands of Cape Verde, I ended up with this series of "street-fronts".
There are some really colourful houses in Cape Verde. The rate of growth seems to be skyrocketing though, so there's also a lot of bare concrete houses yet to be finished.

The original photo was just me playing around with a bit of geometry (can you work out what it is?) but as I was looking for the best places to crop the photo, I started noticing the people on a few of the balconies.
So I cut them out of the photo to stand alone, forever looking overboard.

A mobile phone. A new place. A postcard. Or two.

So this is pretty much my first go at the latest fashion in digital/web-based photography - the moving GIF. GIF files are just image files that move, or rather, a serious of image files that run continuously. You'll most probably have seen them used to show humorous clips from films that repeat themselves over and over again.
Well, someone had the great idea of using this file format to produce moving pictures. What's great about them, and what differentiates them from video, is that you isolate an area of the image that you want to show as movement, whilst everything else remains as a still photo. This allows you to draw the viewer's eye to elements of the photo, something that you would normally do through composition, lighting or focus, for example. 

The principle is quite simple but in practice it doesn't always come out as smoothly as you'd like. One of the most important factor is a steady camera, so make sure you use a tripod. The effect works best when you choose a movement that is, by nature, repetitive (e.g. swinging, flapping, dripping) because then the final result won't look unnatural. Some things simply don't work well, others do. It's all about trial and error.
More to come...