About

Philosophy

If I am asked to give one and only one workshop that would be the most important for an emerging photographer, this would be a 2-part Empty Room workshop.

Well, the room will not be entirely empty.

In the first part, there will be a chair.

The assignment: to make images of the chair in the room that evoke variety of emotions: excitement, joy, grief, calmness, you name it. No, they do not have to be pre-determined. The assignment is to explore the widest range of emotional responses using that chair as the only visual material.

In the second part, there will be a child in that room.

And the assignment, again, is to create images with as wide emotional range as possible.

The idea?

The subject does not matter.

The meaning of the subject and our relationship to it in the “real” world do not matter.

Well, they do, however at a later stage.

They will come back when you are able to create any emotion with any subject.

And after that – only after that! – you merge the emotional value of your subject with the emotional value of your subject-agnostic Image…

Content and navigation

The om.camera domain will host Oleg Moskvin’s camerawork of various nature. The archives will be gradually filled up over the upcoming decades.

Besides galleries, you will also find texts (in a traditional “blog” format) which may or may not be accompanied by images / videos. The texts may be in English, Russian, or both, iterating between the two languages without any particular order. The “order” is, however, taken care of by presence of an extended classification system, which goes beyond the “Language” taxonomy.

One of the classifications you may find in the side bar is “Media” which describes the vehicle of transmitting the main message. A post may have, for example, “Video” attached to it in the “Media” taxonomy, and no “Text”, even if it has some descriptive text that, however, does not carry the main message. For that matter, you may find curious cases of posts with photographs and the “Media” assignment to “Text” only, if photographs are just supplementary illustrations and do not carry the main message. So, the “Media” taxonomy serves not to describe the factual presence of the media but its importance in transmitting the message.

You may also notice dramatically different treatment of photographs and videos here. As much as I am an incurable perfectionist when it comes to photography, I am shockingly careless when it comes to video content. While designing the Portraits of Shadows gallery, I checked over 20 versions of the sequence of the 12 images, until the overall distribution of the tonal spots on the 3 x 4 grid stopped making me dizzy… At the same time, I keep posting raw unedited videos… Go figure!