Wow! Alain Briot linked to my posting Who is the audience of this photo?, where I was discussing an essay written by Briot, and got a very nice comment from Andreas Manessinger.
This kind of thing is - I feel - novel in the history of humankind, the possibility of linking not only between experts in the field, but also between experts and novices such as myself. And photography blogs are a novel thing indeed, made possible because of digital photography and automated systems making a relatively simple process out of tedious manual linking and editing. (Also, there are new feedback mechanisms, such as profiling of visitors and automatic discovery of linking, which make it much easier to discover whether you have an audience or not.)
Speaking of blogging, I have been browsing The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger, and there are a great deal of gems to be found there. In fact, I have started to feel that the whole is much, much bigger than the postings alone (which are nice also). They say that a photo tells as much about the photographer as about the subject. Here we have the tale of 794 daily postings.
There was an interesting comment by Ted Byrne at Andreas' blog, discussing this from a viewer's perspective: "It's especially interesting intellectually to see a photographer let down his frames to show us more of the physical parts of the total culture which surrounds him. So often we rigorously frame things so that the commonplace is excised. For the first time I am seeing how the pieces you see each day fit together. It is something I like yet, alas, I fail to do myself. Somehow the commonplace seems so banal to us, yet will seem almost exotic to others."
Postscript: Actually, I found an interesting dilemma here in writing this posting - to use first names or not when referring to other photographers. In a way, the informality of discussions in the blogsphere encourages to use first names, on the other hand I'm a bit of a formal person. I feel there is no single right way to do this.
The photo is from yesterday, taken from an empty football (soccer) field beside a church, where there was icy and sandy snow, but the grass was green beside the church. A contrast which I feel was interesting, although perhaps not particularly pleasing.
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Alain Briot? Wow! As much as I dislike his preaching of "How To Pursue Finding Your Style", he's certainly a "name" :)
I guess you do what you do very well, and that's key to your success. You cater to the "Don't tak about how, talk about why" crowd like Ted Byrne, Mark Hobson or Paul Butzi do, but that's not enough, they really make good images, and so do you.
Of all of them the most astounding photographer is Mark Hobson. I have all of them seen posting a weak image once in a while, but Mark? I've never seen him fail once. Never. Once. And he posts daily :)
Otoh, Mark has been a professional for ages. Still, it always makes me feel very small :)
We all but Mark fail at times, I certainly know I do, but persistence can make up for that. I probably should do more for my image, polish a portfolio, remove the older, weaker stuff, but thankfully I enjoy photography the same way you do: I don't do it to make a living.
Speaking of persistence, I don't know anyone who posts at such a frantic speed, not even David Ziser, but you always have something interesting to tell. It never feels like posting for numbers. That by itself is amazing.
Regarding names, well, call me Andreas, as I will call you Juha, as soon as I have made for sure that this is your first name.
Only joking :)
But it's true: a language that I have no relations to whatsoever, makes me nervous. I can't figure out a thing. This reminds me of Markus Spring's image some days ago of a signpost in China :)
First, first names is quite ok with me!
I only recently "discovered" Mark Hobson, and your analysis is true: no failures.
On the other hand, personally I think that if I don't fail 50% of the time then I'm not trying hard enough. Only slightly exaggerating...
Returning to the first name problems - recently I listened to radio, where someone talked about three kinds of "friends", or concepts of friends.
1) For the Americans, a friend is someone you met for a minute two years ago: "I know him, he is a friend, a very nice guy."
2) Facebook "friends". Enough said.
3) Finnish/Swedish "friend" - someone you have known and met daily for more that 10 years and can rely on in any kind of problems, how big or small.
... The signpost photo was great.
Can it be that there is some middle ground between 1-2 and 3 :-?
About Mark Hobson: I guess he will have failed like anybody of us, only probably 20 years ago. And here we have them again, those 10000 hours :)
Btw: I'm about to fail today. The material I have is nothing short of pathetic, and I have no idea how to salvage it. Normally I'd go out and shoot some more, but it's raining. Yikes!
About failure: A couple of days ago I started going through your postings in order starting from #1. Now I'm at #129. (And needed to stop at least for a while.) All were great. Perhaps some were greater than others, but that is open to debate.
When reading the postings I started to feel that a photography blog could become a new art form as a whole, not just as individual postings. I'm not thinking here about "reality-tv" type "art", but art as in "fine art photography", where the individual postings a combined into a tapestry of greater art.
By the way, in the postings #1...#129 there were interesting tidbits, for example you linked to an article in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest Finnish newspaper, which I'm not subscribing to (because it is so dominating) and which I'm sometimes writing opinion pieces to (because it is so dominating).
Oh dear, that was something like the Song of the Day, meant to draw additional viewers to the blog. People searching for the events and by chance getting to my blog. It even worked. Not as well as the songs, but it did, only it was too disconnected for my taste.
The songs are fine, because that's a fantastic way to rediscover my own music :)
The article, I can't really remember, what was it about? Now speak of disconnectedness :)
It was #115: "The cooperation with Microsoft may be a big step forward for Finnish game studio Remedy, but it is a sad sign of how Microsoft fragments the market by using games to push their hardware/software."
I noticed this because I used to write columns about related topics in the Finnish IT magazines.
Come to think of it, my first impression (cf. with Alain Briot) of how the net connects "gurus" and "novices" was related to this topic.
I wrote a book review or two about Lawrence Lessig's books, and decided to contact him on some topic - and he responded, in a very nice way, although he was very busy at that time, not only once but several times. That felt great. (And I originally even mis-spelled his name in the first book review.)
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