The cost of photography

After fireworks, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I did a fast review of what kind of costs my photography hobby caused in 2008. (Of course, not counting all the hours spent taking photos, processing them and discussing photography.)

It turned out that there were three categories: equipment, books, and software plus services.

In the equipment category I have the Panasonic LX3, a spare battery, two 2 GB memory cards, an adapter tube plus filter, a camera pouch, and two different mini-tripods. The total cost of these is 520 euro, of which the LX3 was 400 euro.

In the software category, I bought licenses for Pixelmator, Photoshop Elements 6, LightZone, PTGui, PTGui Pro, Flickr (two year pro account), and DoubleTake. Many of these were bought in software bundles with other software, so I'm counting only a portion of those prices here. But the total is still about 300 euro.

As for books about photography, I bought three books in Finnish published by Docendo (including two books by Michael Freeman). In addition, there were quite a lot of other books: Digital photography masterclass (Tom Ang), Photographing the World Around You: A Visual Design Workshop for Film and Digital Photography (Freeman Patterson), Photography for the Joy of It: An Introductory Workshop for Film and Digital Photography (Freeman Patterson), The Tao of Photography: Seeing Beyond Seeing (Philippe L. Gross), The Simple Secret to Better Painting: How to Immediately Improve Your Work with the One Rule of Composition (Greg Albert), Stieglitz: Camera Work (Julia Krumhauer), Magnum Magnum (Brigitte Lardinois), The Creative Digital Darkroom (Katrin Eismann), Life of a Photograph (Sam Abell), The Genius of Photography (Gerry Badger), and On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide (David Hurn). In total I paid for these books about 250 euro.

So, to sum up, the new LX3 camera was the biggest individual item, but suprisingly much went to software/services and books. It seems that there is quite a lot of things to spend in photography. And probably a lot of earning possibilities for those producing the books, software, services etc.

The photo here is from today. A nice scene (on the surface), but the ice is littered with the remains from the fireworks at midnight.

Losing weight and engaging in philosophy at Christmas

Ice and water, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

The photo here is a result from my continuing struggle with post-processing techniques. The original photo had warm tones, thanks to the winter sun low at the horizon, but I wanted to get something different. Also, the ice structure wasn't really visible - just whitish colors.

What I did was to use LightZone polarizer and bright scene filters for basic work, then Pixelmator curves to decrease red and green a bit and increase blue. And finally, a bit of more saturation to the colors.

I probably did everything the wrong way, but at least the photo is closer to my vision that the original one was.

But coming back to the title of this posting, it seems that this is the first Christmas for a long time that I have been losing weight despite eating really well. The long walks with the camera desperately seeking subjects is the reason for this, and perhaps also sleeping very late. (You can't eat when you sleep...)

Paul Butzi has been continuing the conversation about creativity, branching into a discussion on creation/destruction. (And there is also some heavy armament in use.)

I'm not sure whether I like to engage in such philosophy, but I like the original topic. Andreas already commented my thoughts here, and I responded, but I decided to pick the thread again in this posting.

So, coming back to the excellent topic “Productivity, creativity, proxies and goals”, and the reason for why we are doing things…

However sophisticatedly we argue about the reasons and motivations, in the end the reason for doing something demanding comes from inside, a part of us. The reasons may be good reasons or bad, known reasons or unknown, but not much to do with measurement.

As an example, I suspect my interest in photography has less to do with photography than with finding a balance as a human being. It is a kind of meditation, of shutting down the too-much-thinking type of creature in my the head. Photography does the trick for me especially combined with walking outside in the nature. (And losing weight is not a bad thing either.)