car | Michael Hoffman Photography

Posted

February 20, 2015

Lisbon in Focus

When people ask me about the craft of photography – and by no means I want to claim to be an expert – they usually first ask about my gear. I get it, the gear is important. Of course you want to have a DSLR to get a good quality shot and have a lens with a wide spectrum to catch it all. Post-processing is part of it too, some lighting improvements and tone adjustments. But that’s not what it is really about. You can get good equipment nowadays for less and less money, and that’s cool because it allows more and more people to express themselves creatively. But what I like about photography is to get to look closely, find interesting subjects, uncover the hidden things in daily street life. Basically photography – or the kind photography I like – is focusing, finding beauty in common things and following their geometry. The gear helps, but the work is done by the eyes. The result is joy, and maybe some interesting shots (among many many hundreds).

Posted

April 19, 2014

The Silk Road: Buxoro, The Enchanted City

Further in the west there lies the other majestic city along the Silk Road: Buxoro or Bukhara. While Xiva is a beautiful but somewhat enclosed desert city, in Buxoro the connection to the world outside of Central Asia can be felt. In particular influences from Persia and India can be seen here (just look at the first picture). The connecting element to other cities along the Silk Road are the blue cupolas, being the symbols or landmarks of Usbekistan. Oh, and of course the Soviet cars (picture three). I like how the color of many of them still resemble an older kind of (groaning) vehicles 😉 And in case you wonder, the title of an “Enchanted City” was given to Buxoro by the diplomat Fitzroy Maclean, who worked as a diplomat in the British Embassy in Moscow and visited Central Asia in 1938. Later he called the city “enchanted” and compared the architecture to the beauty of the Italian Renaissance. Indeed the mosaics and structures (mostly religious buildings) are a stunning sight.