SIDELINES / rio helmi

My deeply analog orientated brother-in-law walked into the studio today and watched bemused as images were digitized across the computer screens, pixels healing, colors adjusting. He commented that it reminded him of Soviet propaganda days when those who had fallen out of favor were ‘disappeared’ from official photographs.
It got me thinking about the power [...]

Musing over how the strangest of men can hold their nations in thrall (think Kim Il Jong, Papa Doc Duvalier, Hitler, Napoleon) it was inevitable that I should fall into contemplating the Indonesian political landscape. There is an old, tired Indonesian joke about how our first President was mad about women (Soekarno), the second [...]

1st rule: you’re only as good as your team, 2nd rule: your team is only as good as you allow them to be.
Behind the scenes is where the quality of whatever appears up front is decided, there is no question. We photogs spend a fair amount of time hunting for good personnel to work with [...]

Life and Death as seen from Bali
warning: looooong post!
Last week was for me personally a pretty dramatic one. Sometimes life, like the proverbial stage, has complete act changes, with characters either charging in from the wings or abruptly ‘exeunt right’.
On the 8th, my daughter Lani gave birth to little Lucas in London. Whoa – let [...]

So you’re a photog. And you want to go out to dinner with friends, but you just know that on the way or where you are going something is going to happen. Or who knows, NEWS could jump up right in front of you. So do you wanna lug your full frame SLR which has [...]