There is time (or actually many ‘times’) in every artists’ life when changes have to be done. These ‘changes’ vary and sometimes they are changes in artistic approach, changes in personal life influencing the artistic outcomes or self-concious decisions influencing the creativity. It’s time for me to take on those changes and I will concentrate on one of them for the time being.

The most important for me is creativity. There is nothing worse than a non-creative artist and I believe I’ve been such a person for too long. I looked at my pictures recently and I thought: “Where is the message in those pictures? Where? Nowhere!!!” ‘Empty pictures’ or ‘empty photography’ as I call such pictures, are the worst type of photography, especially when someone claims it to be art. It’s o.k. to take simple snapshots of your children and put them online, it’s o.k. to post online simple/random/non-artistic pics, just for fun, for sharing with friends and family. But in some cases, claiming non-artistic photography as a form of art is slightly over the top (in my very personal opinion) – and unfortunately, that’s what I was doing quite often in the past.

Some of you might think at this point: “Oh man, why do you criticize yourself? It’s not good for you/You shouldn’t do it!”. In my opinion, the ability to criticize yourself and your art/photography is one of the most important assets one can have. Self-criticism doesn’t only allow you to see your photography/art in a different way and from a different perspective, but it also allows you to improve yourself. Without self-criticism, you won’t be able to improve your photography/art and improve yourself. Why ‘yourself’ you may ask? I think my passion for photography starts to be a resemblance of myself. Now some of you might say: “Your photography is horrible so if it resembles yourself, then you must be horrible as well”. If you thought something like that, then think why the word ‘passion‘ is highlighted two sentences before

Changes are coming: I promise to myself to be more creative, more artistic, spend more time on art as photography and on ‘making’ pictures rather than just taking pictures (just to explain to those of you who haven’t heard of the expression ‘to make a picture’: it means that you work hard on various aspects of a picture before taking it, you double check light, adjust it, position a subject in a special/proper way, check foreground, background, work on the setting of your camera, aperture, exposure, etc.)

About today’s pictures: I too those pictures (well, almost ‘made’ them ) while visiting some friends in Utrecht a couple of weeks ago. I noticed that my sunglasses are very reflexive and I couldn’t resists to do something with them. I couldn’t choose which of these pictures is the best so I decided to post all three of them here.