spinning infinite stories.
what is the.storylens?
When I was a kid, my father used to always carry around his Zenit SLR, a Soviet Canon clone, wherever he went. He would always take photos of this and that, of my first steps, of parties, of life’s little moments. To him I owe all the memories of my childhood, captured in beautiful black and white photos that last to this day.
It was only after high-school that I got my own point-and-click camera, a Canon S5 IS and starting practising my hand at everything I found. Slowly but surely, I moved up the ladder until I got my first DSLR, a Canon 450D I’d bought from a friend. The rest is history. That was the true start of my experimentation with various lenses, lighting conditions, a long journey of learning that continues to this day.
With time, I realised that I love taking photos that convey emotion, that tell hidden stories and which sometimes leave you wondering about what was going on. Street photography was the perfect way to start, as it fit in perfectly with the type of stories I normally write, and soon discovered that those photos would actually fuel my inspiration.
Thus, the.storylens was born, a concept where I marry the visual arts with the written word to figure out what lies beyond mere pixels. Be it broken down buildings, a mopey passerby, a bee pollinating a daisy, a starry sky in the mountains or a singer clutching a microphone for dear life, all of these have hidden stories to be discovered, felt and told.
the.storylens is not about pixels, it’s not about perfect exposure, perfect sharpness and sometimes not even about the perfect framing, it’s about the right game of light, shadow, subject and colour to convey a feeling in a moment. It’s about telling stories through the lens, a vision of reality with an artistic touch.
a project more than 15 years in the making.
behind the lens.
There has to be someone behind the camera as well, right?. Well, with one finger on the shutter button and an eye seeking absconded emotions there is me, the Storyteller. A technical man, with an IT career spanning many years, but for whom art has been always second nature.
I learned that there’s a place for technology and technique and a place for expression and right at the precipice where they meet there’s me, caught between two worlds most people consider incompatible, but which have much more in common than meets the eye. There is a place for precision in ambiguity and for ambiguity in precision.
In time, I have cultivated a passion for stories, the visual, emotions, words, music and people in everything I’ve done in my life. This project is the culmination of all that I have learned and created throughout the years.
the.storylens in numbers.
