Patrick Joust's tumblr

tanzdreamerr asked: Hello Patrick. Every time when I look at your photography, I feel trapped behind an invisible sphere of me and the world seen from the lens of your personal perception. Your ability to transform photography into personal chronicle is beautiful and inspiring. I'm thinking to finally buy a professional camera, so do you care to tell me what camera do you use or at least to give me some useful advice? It would mean a lot to me.

What a nice thing to say. Thank you very much!

It’s difficult to give specifics on what kind of camera to get without knowing what format you’re interested in (digital, 35mm film, medium format, etc.) or what you want to use it for. I’m also not a “professional” photographer but I’ll offer some general ideas. If you’re mostly interested in digital, a full-frame sensor is pretty hard to beat. I have the original Canon 5D, which is relatively inexpensive these days on the used market. I mostly use it as a point and shoot camera around the house, which is kind of a shame, since it’s such a good camera, but I don’t enjoy using it as much as my film cameras. I have a couple of paid shoots coming up though and that’s the camera I’ll be using for the most part.

If you’re interested in film, there are a lot of relatively inexpensive options out there to get started, since most professionals (wedding, sports, etc. photographers) are now shooting digital. The camera you decide on depends a lot on what you want to use it for. If I was shooting sports, digital seems like the best choice, but if you’re more interested in “fine art” photography, medium or large format film could be the best option (though, I say this reluctantly as digital is pretty applicable to anything you want it to, I’m just biased towards film ;)

In the end though, the camera doesn’t matter as much as how you use it. Optics have been great for a long time on a wide range of cameras, so you really just want to think about how it’s being recorded and whether the quality you’re getting there is enough to achieve what you want. If you want to make large prints than clearly a phone camera isn’t your best choice, but you might not have to spend too much to get something that works just fine.

So anyway, this is kind of a vague answer but if you can give me a better idea of what you’re interested in, I might be able to offer more advice. It took me a long time to find the equipment that suited me best. It helps to get your hands on a few different types to see what you like.

lcdpix asked: Salut Patrick, I love your work ! Nico

Thanks very much Nico!

takingadotforawalk asked: Heya :) just wondering how you would describe your style and what inspires you to take a photo? Do you just see a scene and take a quick snap or do you plan it all out or something? I think your photography is amazing by the way, truly beautiful! :)

Thank you very much for your nice words about my work!

I’m not sure how I would describe my style. I always have trouble with that question because I have a lot of interests when it comes to photography. Obviously I like night photography a lot but I also enjoy walking around on the street and taking pictures of people. I think I’ve been influenced a lot by what I’ve read, painting, movies, other people’s photos, etc. It all gets mixed together and has a lot to do with the pictures I take. Also the format I choose often influences what I produce.

How I go about taking pictures depends on the situation. Things are rarely all that planned out, but I might have some ideas of what I want to get ahead of time in a certain neighborhood or place. For night shots I’ll sometimes scope out things ahead of time and try to imagine whether it’s worth returning to at night, check out where the street lights are, how safe it might be, etc. For “street photography” and portraiture it’s almost always pretty random, I just snap when I see something or someone that looks interesting.

cadillacranchdressing asked: Just curious on your thoughts on the new Flickr redesign.

Hi Josh,

hmmm… I’m not sure what to think so far, but I can’t say I’m super impressed by the new design. What do you think? It reminds me a lot of 500px, and while there are some things about 500px that I like, I definitely preferred the “classic” design of the old flickr. 500px actually seems cleaner to me though compared to the new flickr design.

While it does seem like flickr has allowed itself to go a bit stale in recent years, especially when it comes to a lot of social networking stuff, I think gradual change would have been smarter. Many of the best pages on the web have evolved gradually. Google, for instance, has obviously changed a lot over the years, but it’s search page is as recognizable today as it ever was. flickr had something going for it in much the same way, but now it looks like a completely different website. I really don’t understand why sites, programs, etc. have to be completely transformed every couple of years rather than as the need arises. flickr was instantly recognizable even by people who didn’t use it, so why would you throw that completely away. Giving people different viewing options is the better idea. A focus on individuality and customization would be a smart approach. Why do we all have to look at web pages the exact same way as everyone else? There hasn’t been much progress in design and programming if we all have to do things in lockstep.

All that being said, I don’t want to be too negative, especially since I’m just starting to use the new setup. I like how you can create your own banner image thing. I also kind of like the justified views, I just wish they didn’t load so slowly.

A lot of web designers are oddly conservative. Their efforts seem to follow typical patterns that correspond to a need to have something new to do and less with real innovation. There’s too often an all or nothing approach that doesn’t have anything to do with the needs of the user. It’s too bad flickr didn’t keep up with what people were asking for over the years rather than this sudden change. I’m not surprised that the feedback so far has been so negative. You have to expect that kind of thing if you don’t take users into account. At this point I hope they do a better job of trying to satisfy the diverse needs of their users. I think they can overcome a lot of problems from the current design if they do a good job listening to constructive feedback and make changes as necessary, preferably in the way of individualized customization. Of course, they haven’t done that so far, so I’m probably being recklessly naive even mentioning the idea :)

I’m surprised at the account changes too, but from the looks of things, I guess I can go to a free account and still have all my photos viewable to everyone and just about every other feature I had before, so that’s pretty cool. Hopefully the ads I see won’t be too obnoxious. I get enough stuff about christian singles and testosterone supplements in my yahoo mail! Oh wait, flickr’s owned by yahoo and now tumblr is too! uh oh!! ;)

…

Update: …after a little more exploring it just seems really clunky. I can understand why so many are considering leaving flickr altogether. The trouble is, I can’t think of a good alternative. Anyone using another site that they really like? It will take a long time for another site to build up the same kind of community that exists on flickr, which for me has always been its best feature. I guess we’ll see how this all evolves, but it doesn’t look good…