Tuesday, June 1, 2010

1001th posting - about obsessions and lots of walking


Fir, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Ladybug, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Calla, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Fallen, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

After the 1000th posting, I was quite busy and didn't have much ideas for writing here are Light Scrape. But I didn't stop taking photographs - indeed, I took about 1100 photographs in three days. There is so much to see. Summer is proceeding, and it has been beautiful: both rain and sunshine. Now the lenght of day is 18 hours 24 minutes, so there is plenty of light available.

Andreas postulated that continuing a photography blog past one year means it becomes an obsession. I have been thinking about this (though not obsessively) and can't decide whether it is so or not. Perhaps the word "habit" might fit better, or "routine". Although they are too weak, I guess. Is there a word for something you do, between an obsession and a habit?

Another matter which I remembered only after thinking about this for a while is walking. In fact, I at one point used to write more about walking than photography here. And it is indeed unclear whether I go for a walk and take photographs, or take photographs and walk. I did a quick estimate, and in two years I must have walked between 1500 and 2000 kilometers while taking all these photographs. (And done a little bit of cross-country skiing also.)

Returning to photography, I liked Letter to George at TOP. The posting generated a lot of comments. Some didn't get the joke. In any case, the posting was rather good characterization of gear-driven photography, so I was planning to write a response, tentatively titled "How I bought a 400 € digicamera and survived with it for over 20 months". But didn't have time for this.

In any case, I have managed to survive 20 moths with the LX3 as my main and only camera. In the beginning I did a lot of exploring of various settings of the LX3, but now I'm more or less set permanently. In fact, I would like to glue the mode dial in place so that it never moves by mistake. What I still do is tweak some settings based on the season - spring, summer, autumn, winter - but that is all. Otherwise, I'm happy with my three custom settings stored under C2.

Returning to walking, recent research suggests the following: "Higher parental TV viewing was associated with an increased risk of high levels of TV viewing for both boys and girls." So, getting off the couch helps to avoid becoming a couch potato. And walking is one way of being somewhere else than on the couch.

Also, I guess I should have pointed to the very first posting at this blog, dated July 13th, 2008. For the first week or so, the photographs were quite small, but a little later I switched more or less to the current format. And the very first comment arrived on July 20th. And on July 21st, I wrote the first item about the Panasonic LX3, which I bought two monts later.

2 comments:

stephanie clara said...

Between habit and obsession... passion?

stephanie

Juha Haataja said...

That sounds about right!