Spending the day in a shopping mall

Steps, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today we spent most of the day in a shopping mall. It was tiring, but sometimes you need to do things like this. I would have preferred going for a walk outside, but on the other hand today was a clouded day, so at least there was no sunshine wasted.

I took a couple of photographs at the mall, both abstract (trying to get nice compositions of the architecture and decorations) and street photography. Not much success with this, I'm afraid, but at least there was a bit of photography exercise even today.

Update: I started to answer a comment by Markus Spring on "political" photographs, and this got me thinking a bit further on the topic. What is the difference between "political" photography and photographs that express opinions?

For example, I have strong opinions about certain subjects (such as science), but they are not popular topics, so it is probable that these opinions wouldn't be "political" in the sense of interesting a great many people (and thus, they wouldn't interest politicians). And trying to express these opinions in photographs doesn't seem a worthwhile cause. (Even if I had the skill.)

On the other hand, there certainly are subjects which are popular but not necessarily political. For example things which provide enjoyment - beauty - for the viewers.

But perhaps there is a politial viewpoint here as well. Presenting (or trying to present) beauty may be a conservative viewpoint: being satisfied with things, enjoying the world as it is, not promoting a change.

Update: I continued the reading spree today, starting and finishing Joseph Wambaugh's "The Golden Orange", a film noir style novel about an alcoholic ex-detective with lots of twists and humor in the dark plot. It was good, but I felt it could have been better, as some of the characters were just caricatures, entertainment for the masses. But the good parts (with real human feelings) were really good. Now I'm reading "Thicker than Blood" by M. A. Newhall, a novel written online using Creative Commons licensing. I'm not yet sure how good the book is, but the first two dozen pages are not bad at all.

Update 2: Well, I finished the book "Thinker than Blood" and it was ... juvenile. After a somewhat promising beginning it deteriorated into a shamble: holes in the plot, badly motivated characters, stereotypic science fiction elements, and plain bad writing. But there was some promise as well - it is as if a bunch of well-meaning teenagers had tried to write a novel together, but nobody was in charge of the big picture.

Update 3: Andreas has been active in commenting my postings, and has reminded me of what I was thinking a few weeks ago. At that point, I was reading the book "On Being a Photographer". Finally I was much disappointed with it. However, the book "The Life of a Photograph" by Sam Abell was revelatory, telling (and mostly showing) of how to "make" photographs instead of "taking" them. I'm not sure if you could say Abell has a style - but he does have a way of combining rough reality with beauty, human beings with landscape, snapshot aesthetics with well-developed documentary thinking. In this light, the discussion in the book "On Being a Photographer" seems almost trivial.