Nowadays everybody with a camera tends to think of him or herself as a photographer so, between millions of photos on Flickr, DeviantART and other similar websites, talented artists end up getting lost in the noise. Our team at 7 Tutorials decided to help promote some of these less known photographers and showcase their work to the world. How?
We will start a series of interviews and Windows 7 themes featuring their work. Our first guest in this series happens to be a Romanian by the name of Mihai Fischer. He is a young and talented software engineer with a passion for conceptual photography. If you want to learn about him, his work and download a great theme for Windows 7, read this interview.
Getting to Know Mihai Fischer
Born and raised in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Mihai Fischer is an engineer in Electronics, Telecommunications and IT. He is currently working as a Adobe Flex designer. His passion? Conceptual photography, a genre in which the artist makes a photograph of a concept or idea, often involving the use of computer editing to achieve the desired effect (definition source: Wikipedia).
We wanted to learn more about Mihai, beyond this simple introduction, so we asked him a few questions:
When did you decide to become an engineer and why?
Hah, somewhere at the beginning of my high-school years, back when I wasn’t yet sure if I should leave aside history and arts. Actually this is a pretty hard choice even now.
How did the passion for photography start?
It all started from the idea of sharing my thoughts with other people, in a way that they could somehow recognize themselves in these reflexions of my mind. I also wanted to allow them to put their own little stories to fill in the pieces they don’t understand in my photographs.
Why conceptual photography?
It was the easiest way for me to express myself back when I first started shooting. It would have been harder to express things that I didn’t yet fully understand through portraits of other people, so I stuck to conceptual still life.
How does conceptual photography mix with engineering?
At first it was OK, as I had time for both. In my last years as a student I had less and less time for photography. I’m still trying to somehow combine my passion for photography, design, and arts in general with my work.
What comes first: the idea or the photo?
Being a conceptual photographer, for me the idea primes. I never could contour something before imagining it, putting it down on paper. It’s not like street photography (which lately I started to embrace) where you go with the moment, you shoot as soon as your eye catches something interesting. Conceptual still life is all about the idea and your delivery methods. So making sketches of what you what to present (even if only in your head), is a very important first step.
What inspires you to make a photo?
Past and present feelings, new experiences, life day by day... that kind of stuff.
What gear and applications do you use for your work in photography?
Right now I’m using my Olympus E-410 SLR, a PC with Photoshop on it, and a lot of improvised stuff, like backgrounds, lights, etc.
What gear and applications do you use in your engineering job?
At the moment I’m working as a software engineer so... not much of gear there besides my Dell machine with an Intel Core 2.3 processor, 6GB of RAM and two nice 21’’ Samsung displays.
As I’m working on developing rich Internet applications, I have installed Adobe Flash builder with Flex 3.5 , 4.0 and 4.5 SDK’s. I also have Visual Studio for my short quests on the server side of software development. :)
Are you a Mac or a PC? :)
Let’s say I’m a Mac on Sundays and a PC the rest of the week. :)
Do you use Windows 7? What do you like about it?
Yep, I do use Windows 7. I consider it the best operating system launched by Microsoft since Windows 98. It just copes better than other operating systems with my development tools.
Mihai Fischer’s Work - the Windows 7 Theme
We recommend you to use your favorite BitTorrent client to download the theme pack. You can find the BitTorrent download page here: Conceptual Photography - Windows 7 Theme. You can download the torrent file directly from here.
NOTE: if you are not familiar with BitTorrent and how to download files via this file sharing protocol, please read this tutorial: Using BitTorrent to Share Big Files with You - How Will it Work?
You can also download the files via your web browser. However, the download speed might be much lower:
COPYRIGHT: Mihai Fischer. If you plan to use the pictures included in this theme for something else than your desktop backgrounds, you need written permission from their author.
Conclusion
Mihai Fischer is a photographer who’s work we enjoy, which happens to also enjoy our work. Therefore he quickly decided to share some of his works with our readers via a Windows 7 theme pack. We thank him a lot for agreeing to this collaboration and we wish him the best of luck in his future work (both in photography and software development). If you want to familiarize yourself with more of his work, don’t hesitate to visits his Flikr profile. You’ll find lots of interesting compositions.
NOTE: If you happen to know some other great photographers or other types of artists, worth featuring in our series, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. We will definitely look into it.
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