Sunrise and sunset at Laajalahti

Sunrise at Laajalahti, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Laajalahti shore at sunrise, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Snow, ice and clouds, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Sunset moon, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I visited the Otaniemi campus area early in the morning and during afternoon, and both times I took a couple of photos at the Laajalahti bay.

Thanks to the cold weather, the bay has frozen over. We got a little bit of snow yesterday, and the wind has made patterns of snow and bare ice. Here is a little story in photos, from sunrise to sunset at Laajalahti.

I got today three photography books I ordered from Amazon.co.uk: Life of a Photograph, The Genius of Photography, and On Being a Photographer. Thanks to the exchange rate of euro, these book were quite a bargain.

I started reading and browsing the Genius book, which is a large-format book discussing the impact of photography on modern society ("How photography has changed our lives").

What the book certainly has is excellent quotations about photography. I felt unsophisticated and barbaric after the first two dozen pages or so. There is so much to know about the history and meaning of photography that it is hard to know where to start learning more.

Thinking of photographs as "mirrors" or "windows" was interesting - this is another way of formulating the craft vs. art problematic. (Actually, it seems that in the early times of photography the question was posed in the form whether photography was "art or science".)

In any case, photography is heavy stuff, whether you look at it as a "social function", or as a "geographical and temporal projection". Another good insight was a quote from Walker Evans, saying that photography is driven by "a simple desire to recognise and to boast".

So, the Genius book seems promising, although it is also a bit fragmentary, and I'm not sure whether the book contains a coherent argument. But it provides a lot of directions for further exploration, that is for sure.

About the other two books I can't say anything, as I haven't opened them yet.