Tuesday, December 23, 2008

#501


Decorations, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I forgot to celebrate the 500th posting, so I try to do something with the 501st one. Unfortunately my photography was not productive today, just some hastily taken photos while shopping, and then some non-original things during the evening when having a walk outside with the family. So, I hope you are not disappointed with the photo here.

Not having had luck with photography, I tried Google with keywords "501 photography". This turned up two interesting tidbits: books titled "501 Must Visit Natural Wonders" and "501 Great Artists: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of the Art World". Being a sucker for books, I ordered the first one from Amazon.

Books are not the only thing the number 501 has in connection to photography. It is overwhelming how much stuff there is to be found with Google.

Returning to books, I just received two books on photography from Amazon: "Magnum Magnum", a really big book by top photographers, and "The Creative Digital Darkroom", a guide to post-processing. The Magnum book contains an almost endless series of quality photographs. The post-processing guide will - I hope - help developing my post-processing skills which are severely lacking. I could do much more with the photos than I'm currently doing.

It is hard to stop telling about books, so here goes. Some time ago I bought the book "Tao of photography - seeing beyond seeing" by Gross and Shapiro, an insightful interpretation of the art of photography. I just noticed a web site with the same name, although I don't think it is related. There was a posting about "flow", a term made popular by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Incidentally, I once wrote a book review (in Finnish) about his book on flow. The posting doesn't seem to be far off the mark, interesting discussion there.

Returning to the photo here. As you can see, we have now a couple of millimeters of snow here in south Finland. Actually, I don't know if it possible to have any less snow so that it is noticeable. But you could start to imagine that we are having a white Christmas. Not bad.

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