1 Year NoArt-Blog

It’s been lots of fun going out and photographing, watching my images improve and writing the blog, so I guess it was all worth it.

Well then, happy birthday to… me!

Click on the Images

A friend of mine remarked that (1) the images on this blog are too small to see well and (2) when there are multiple images in one post, it’s difficult to concentrate on just one image.

Well, I’m using a fixed-width layout for this blog, and it is not possible to display anything wider than 500 pixels, so inline I’m already showing the largest possible images. But starting with this post if you click on any image, you will see just that image against a white background. And if the photograph is one that I’m particularly happy with, I’ll make the target image larger than the inline one.

Hopefully these changes will make viewing the blog more enjoyable.

Why are There no Comments on this Blog?

There seems to be a technical problem with leaving comments on WordPress.com (the host of this blog) — since about 6 weeks you cannot post any comments on this blog. If you want to leave a comment, please e-mail it to me and I’ll append it to the appropriate posting.

For the technically inclined: WordPress.com uses a spam-detection service called Akismet, which cannot be deactivated. If everything worked OK, each comment would be checked by Akismet and get classified as “spam” or “no spam.” The “no spam” comments from first-time posters get held for moderation indefinitely, comments from posters with at least one approved comment are immediately visible. The “spam” comments go to the spam queue, and I have to either delete them or mark them as “not spam.” If I take no action within 15 days, the “spam” comments get deleted indefinitely.

The problem is that in the last 6 weeks Akismet has marked all comments (90 in total) as “spam,” but the spam queue has only shown 6 comments. The other 84 are gone, and surely not all of these were spam. In fact, from the 6 comments that I did see, 2 were good ones.

Welcome!

I love photography and I’ve been photographing seriously since 1997. I can take a well focused photograph with a clear theme and with proper exposure any time, but my images rarely create an emotional responce in the viewer. If you ask me to show you my greatest photos, I’d be able to show about 10, maybe 15 — but that’s it, from over 20 GB of images on my hard drive.

The problem is definitely not lack of equipment or lack of understanding of the technical concepts. I know all about aperture, shutter-speed, depth-of-field, metadata, color spaces, profiles, shooting RAW, exposing to the right and so on. I have an excellent DSLR, a couple of high-quality zooms, a few primes, flash, tripod — the whole lot. So I guess I am the weakest link in the chain — as a photographer composing the image in the viewfinder and as a photographer using Photoshop.

Maybe I’m setting my goals too high, but I don’t think so.

So come along, follow me in my quest to improve my images and if you can, help me become an artist.

Yours truly
06 July, 2007
Hamburg, Germany