latentsouls

"All that you need to make a film is a gun and a girl" - Godard

2009-11-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

I had written this as my study paper in March at my Institute. On this great filmmaker that I am exploring called 'Jean-Luc Godard' Read and try to watch his films like 'Breathless' and 'A Band Apart' I do have both the films on DVD so if anybody want to see them you can just call me. :)

Godard

Platform - Sept-Oct 2009

2009-10-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

Click on the image to enlarge.

Canon 5D Mark ll Trials.

2009-08-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

Canon 5D Mark ll trails from Swapnil Sonawane on Vimeo.

Shot on the 5D, extremely impressive, great colors, beautifully sharp. The video has a slight shake coz I was pulling the focus on a the huge n heavy 70-200mm lens and the camera was on a not so great Manfrotto tripod. :P

I really want to shoot more on this one!
enjoy!

Another freeze frame from one of the videos.

Gas station. Bangalore.

2009-08-23T01:44:00.001-07:00

Shot on a Sony point-and-shoot. Think it was at 5:45 in the morning.

Untitled Abhi.

2009-08-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

Just putting it togather.

2009-08-06T22:15:00.001-07:00

Both the places don't look any thing like they do in these pictures :P

Happy Accidents

2009-07-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

Shot on film with my 35mm Nikon FM2. Developed and scanned at a careless, stupid film processing lab in madras. Resulted in some beautiful landscapes. Happy accidents as Conrad Hall would say :)

Untitled at Marina

2009-07-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

The Silent Gallery.

2009-07-04T00:25:00.000-07:00

I did this series in Delhi as a part of this photography workshop conducted by Beat Presser (swiss photographer) in December 08. We spent 10 amazing days exploring the concept 'My Oasis Of Silence'. And the deal was, by the end of the workshop every photographer should come up with a series of photographs depicting his/her oasis of silence.

I found my silence in the ever silent walls and ceilings of the 'National Gallery of Modern Art'. As they have to be latent and take a backseat so that the paintings by the great artists can be in the limelight.

Every time I go to Delhi I find myself spending hours at this beautiful Gallery.

Wall as usual

2009-07-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

Click on the image to enlarge and read.

2009-06-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

ma and pa

2009-06-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

I really don't have to write anything.

Mumbai edit

2009-06-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

One fine day Hayden comes up to me and says that he wants some cool looking slides to project on a screen behind the band that he plays in. They were suppose to perform at some concert. Now I get hyper about it and say that I'll only make a video and that he's suppose to pay for the travel and other small expences. :P He discusses it with his band and says yes. Pamila aka pami has a new camera that she wants to play with. I tell her about this small project and she gets hyper about it. We decided and shot this on a Sunday.

Music is from the movie Aamir and it's been edited by Chandana.

Mumbai Edit from Swapnil Sonawane on Vimeo.

hmm... it's a bit long (11mins), but it's fun.
special love for pami and hayden who paid for it :P

HMImonstura by: Harsh

2009-05-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

The photograph that I took on a shooting location

and this is what Harsha makes out of it! Now is he cool or what! :D Hats off to you man.

Lazy yes : guilty no!

2009-05-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

It was an amazingly lazy weekend. Came down to Bangalore to meet pavee and nishat, I got in there house at around 9:00 pm on 22nd and haven't stepped out as yet! (24th 8:46 pm :P) Just saw films and slept and ate some great food that nishat cooked. :)

Smoking on Sunny Sunday

2009-05-18T06:35:00.000-07:00

Linju in love :P

2009-05-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

Click on the image to view it at actual size.

Linju the gentle giant, talking to his girlfriend. :)

The unseen rise

2009-05-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

Let the whole video load and then watch it.

The unseen rise from Swapnil Sonawane on Vimeo.

Just an experiment with animation and time-laps photography!

PhotoStory! :)

2009-05-12T05:44:00.001-07:00

Let the whole video load and then watch it.

The day my cycle said... enough is enough! from Swapnil Sonawane on Vimeo.

Tamil Art part2

2009-04-07T00:33:00.000-07:00

Remember I had posted some amazing shoes earlier on the blog? Well this post is just an extension. :) Believe me it's just a fraction of what the city has in-stored when it comes to street art! I will keep on clicking more as long as I stay here in this amazing city of great exuberance.

For the starters: Southern India's first family :) enjoy!

Puducherry

2009-05-07T19:43:00.000-07:00

A beautiful place with some beautiful friends and my camera, nothing beats that combination!
I went to Puducherry (Pondi) last weekend, had heard about the place for so long,
about it's former French colony and the beach cafes! We even hired some bikes and went around the city, which was really great, though I wouldn't go so far and say that it was better than riding in Goa but even these rides are worth it. Went to Auroville for a while, I thought that the place was nice but not a kind of place that would really trigger me.

Walking in and around the french colony area was really good and it does give a feel that you are not in India but it doesn't last long, as u step out of those lanes you are back to what we best know as a city (peeep peep, honk honk) :P

While taking all the photographs below I somehow thought of including the pavement's into the frame. I think that's what binds the entire series together.

Bodhgaya

2009-05-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

43 photographs put together.

Abida 'Mere Dil Se'

2009-04-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

Year 2000. I am in 10th standard, in a military boarding school. Doing stuff like clandestine jumps over the fences of my school to get chicken fried rice, bunking class to hear a Viraj sing bollywoodies on a beautiful tree house he had built on some Nilgiri trees, having a fight with the seniors and them claiming that we (the furious six AVSMDR) started it. ;-) Basically in some other world far far away from the world of art, of any kind.

And on the other end of the universe a great sufi singer Abida Parveen released an album the same year called Raqs-e-Bismil just a month before my 18th birthday! AND I HAD NO CLUE! It took me three years of going to a art school, two breakups, listening to old hindi film songs, Jagjit Singh, and even Pankaj Udas until my cousin gave my dad an audio CD that he thought was one of the greatest sufi singers to live; I heard it and just felt graduated on to a different level. A place I never thought existed! She sung about love and god at the same time in the same verse. Love felt so pure in her ironclad voice.

I had no words to describe what I had experienced. Instantly we surrender to her music. For months to follow, her album was the only thing that me and my dad gifted to our friends and relatives, and the only thing me and my sister fought on was who would keep the walkman. :)

We bought every album that came out, but I think Kabir by Abida, Mere Dil Se, and above all Raqs-e-Bismil had the best lineup. Muzaffar Ali's music in Raqs-e-Bismil, the saxophone in Mere Dil Se and Gulzar's voice in Kabir by Abida just levitated the whole experience to a highly spiritual level.

Abidaji being of a Pakistani origin; I thought, with the love-hate relationship that we share with our neighbor, to hear her live either the PM has to put me on a bus or a miracle was the only way. So prayers were answered and in Feb 08' she did perform in Pune (I later discovered that she had been performing in India for quite a while). Me and my friend where at the venue one and a half hour before the concert started to get the best seats in the audience, only to discover that the place was already wall-to-wall with people. The great part was that my sister and her friends had reserved some place for us right in the front :)

I had to photograph her performance and for which I needed a faster lens than the 200mm that I have (max opening: 4) as the performance was on a school ground and started at around 6:00 in the evening and went on till 10:00 if I remember correctly. My dearest friend Kunal was kind enough to lend me his beautiful camera (EOS 5D) with a equally beautiful IS lens 70mm - 200mm with a constant opening of 2.8. It was one of the greatest live performances I've ever experienced.

First photograph is my personal favorite where my sister had tears in her eyes as she heard Abidaji perform.

Culture and Strategy

2009-04-03T03:24:00.000-07:00

AH2 (Art Happens Here)

2009-04-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

Ah2 was a project that I had started when I was in Ogilvy (Mumbai) in 2007. Had my office's small digi camera, a b/w printer and beautiful a MAC at my dispense ;) So I had a lot of fun doing this one. Basically as the title suggests I wanted to say that ART happens here, between us, all around us! All that you need to do is see it, eat it, conceive it, and you'll be amazed by how much pleasure you can get from the smallest thing around you :).

I just started taking pictures of every thing that came my way! Took pictures while coming to the office, in the office while we where getting briefed for some project ;), when i went out with my friends, took pictures of kids sleeping under the flyover at night, in the train... everything! And the fun part was that I would make small B/W 4"x6" prints with just a AH2 logo on it and stick them at the same place that I had taken the picture the day before. And it would be great to see them every day till somebody had put a poster or something on it :) but even that would be great because I would take another picture of the place and stick it on top of the poster again. It was like my open air art gallery. Some friends had started noticing these pictures stuck on wall and in the streets and it I would feel really nice when they came and told me about it.

I mostly treated everything in the frame as lines and not the subject itself, so composing was fun.

It was just an amazing experience.
As for the Bauhaus question: If one should tilt or not? I say tilt it all the way! :)