For survival, it’s the little things that count

Nuuksio 1

Nuuksio 2

Nuuksio 3

Nuuksio 4

Nuuksio 5

Nuuksio 6

Nuuksio 7

Nuuksio 8

I have been using poetry as the source for posting titles here for some time. Yesterday I was too lazy and invented the title myself. However, it has been a nice thing to read a few lines of poetry each day, searching for a collection of words that would fit as the title, and provide some additional content to the images. You could say that I have been trying to use poems as frames for the photographs.

The photographs were taken at lake Pöksynhaara in Nuuksio on August 2nd.

(Posting title is from the poem Darwin’s Bestiary by Philip Appleman.)

Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem

Street

Windows

Blur 1

Blur 2

Deli

Rain

I commuted by car today, because a lot of rain was promised. And so it happened. But as it was Friday, and busy day on the roads, it took me over an hour to get home. And you know I don't like sitting in a car in a traffic jam. Well, at least I had the camera with me.

When trying to give an answer to the comments by Cedric and Rosanna to the posting from yesterday, I was inspired to discuss photography as a profession vs. a hobby. Here is a quote from my answer to Rosanna's comment:

[H]ere in Finland there as been heated debate about amateur photographers "destroying" the livelihood of pro photographers, especially those amateurs who (like me) put their photographs on the web using cc-type licenses.

After thinking about this for a while, I feel that I'm not really a photographer in that sense at all. I take photographs because I'm curious about the world, and want to learn about it (and myself), and the camera is a tool for this. And when I put the photographs on the web I'm hoping that someone somewhere benefits from my discoveries, however small they may be.

Thus, taking photographs and posting them on the net is for me an act of using the freedom of speech. This has nothing to do with the profession of photographers, or the monetary value of photographs.

And to say this more clearly, here is a quote from A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

(Posting title is from the quote above.)

If anything fits, it’s accidental

Fallen

Evening

Ligularia dentata

I feel tired. Maybe it is due to the bicycle commute, but I took it rather slow today. Or maybe it is just the general autumn hurry which is exhausting.

In any case, I haven't had much energy for taking photographs recently, even though I have been reading about photography. Today I posted a review (in Finnish) of the book Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach by Ansel Adams, a book which I did like a lot although the technology discussed is certainly out of date these days.

Posting title is from the poem Dreams by Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. I have borrowed a book of her poems, 100 poems translated into Finnish, from the library, and she really is something. Also, some of her poems use photography terms explicitly (such as the poem Negative) while others feel like photographs. Recommended!

If it doesn't come bursting out of you

Construct

Bicycle

Flags

Fences

Reflect

It rained this morning, and heavy clouds darkened the day. I commuted by bus, reading Post Office, a novel written by Charles Bukowski, and quite a novel it is.

I started reading Bukowski some weeks ago, with a collection of his poems translated into Finnish, and then this novel. I didn't expect much, but this novel was quite an experience, combining the low and high in a rather original way.

(Posting title is from the poem So You Want To Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski.)

From segment, fragment, he can reconstruct the whole

Flow

Reflect

Birches

Moon

View

Window

Well, today I finally managed to upload the rest of the photographs from yesterday to Flickr. It must have been a temporary hiccup with FlickrExport for Aperture. All these photographs were taken during a walk just before sunset.

Posting title is from the poem Part for the Whole by Robert Francis. I like this poem, and I think it is rather relevant to photography. Maybe even self-evident... though I suspect there is a deeper meaning to the poem than the first reading shows.

By the way, as someone who occasionally falls into gear obsession (e.g., Canon 5D Mark III, Olympus OM-D E-M5, Nikon D800, ...), the posting "So, here’s a thread from Hammeruser.com" is priceless: "A real carpenter could have done that with rusty wire and a rock. It’s not about the equipment, it’s about the carpenter." (Via George Barr.)

Most spacious meeting places

View

Path

Eric Jeschke commented about my recent post titles. I tried to write an answer, but it turned into a posting.

Each of these recent post titles is a quote from a poem in English: Bring back chaos out of shape (The Room by Conrad Aiken), The frolic architecture of the snow (The Snow Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson), But the tune your bones play (Lines for Winter by Mark Strand), and To weave the garlands of repose (The Garden by Andrew Marvell).

I have been trying to read and understand Enlish language poetry, but it is hard going. Poetry is not easy to comprehend if you are not a native speaker of the language, at least it is so for me. But there are also differences between the poets and poems, and some poems seem to transcend the language.

I have read Enlish language poems translated into Finnish, and sometimes this works well, but it can also be that a lot is lost in translation.

Going to the other direction, from Finnish to Enlish, I got a big surprise recently. Namely, a certain Finnish poet has been a difficult one to understand for me, even though I have tried to approach her poetry every once in a while.

The poet in question, Mirkka Rekola, has been the topic of many academic treatises and dissertations, and her poems have been described as the "most spacious meeting places in Finnish poetry". There have comparisons to Sappho's "fragments", or the classical Chinese poets' works, but still, I have been baffled.

Slowly I have grown to suspect that in some of her poems the sense of being perplexed may be the key to understanding. It may be that the poems are not puzzles for the mind, but for the emotions, and thus they are spacious, open to a multitude of interpretations.

But anyway, I'm currently reading a book titled Five from Finland, which is a collection of poems translated from Finnish into English by Anselm Hollo. The five poets are Mirkka Rekola, Kai Nieminen, Lauri Otonkoski, Tomi Kontio and Riina Katajavuori.

And now I'm happy, as I suddenly got a sense of Mirkka Rekola's poetry, out of these English translations. The poems are not easy to explain, at least in words, but suddenly there is an open vista in front of me.

Here is a quote from a poem of hers (poetry collection The Wind's Last Year by Mirkka Rekola, translated by Anselm Hollo):

On the right side, on the left,
still on the same street; but no meeting.
Is that why I look at boats,
sketch a prow,
as if to solve this.
...
This I would like to leave: a boat like a leaf,
prow in the air, on its way back.

Rekola is described, as a person and as a poet, in Aarne Kinnunen's book "Fulltime Life" (Päätoiminen elämä, 2011). Kinnunen made an impressive career, serving as Professor Extraordinarius of Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki.

Kinnunen tells in his book why it is stupid to explain the works of an author by their living circumstances. However, he also knew Rekola in person (if she could be known at all), and this all is very interesting, I highly recommend the book.

But Rekola's poems are something else than her life. I don't know what they mean when they say that to become a poet you have to live a poet's life.

It cannot be contained

Blurry

View

Flow

Flooded

I answered Paul's question about reading poetry in Enlish and in (translated) Finnish.

I'm not yet fully recovered from the flu, so instead of writing something else here I'm copying my answer verbatim below. And in fact this was an answer to some other question, not the one Paul was really asking. But what was that other question, that is the question.

----

I tried to find Finnish translations of English poems that made an impact, but that proved to be time-consuming and difficult. So I'm looking from the other direction as well: reading anthologies of poems translated into Finnish and then checking out how the original reads.

As an example, I just borrowed from the library an anthology of English, Scottish and Irish poems, originally written by Fleur Adcock, Simon Armitage, John Burnside, Ciaran Carson, Kate Clanchy, Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore, Geoffrey Hill, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley, Don Paterson, Deryn Rees-Jones, Robin Robertson, Jo Shapcott, Pauline Stainer - none of which I knew previously. (The name of the book is "Kuuna päivänä".)

We are also reading with the children a book of translated poems and stories, including work by Whitman and Eliot. Children loved these.

Another thing altogether are poems translated from Chinese or Japanese ... It seems impossible that any meaning can survive, so different are the languages. But we have excellent translators (poets themselves) in Finland, who have created translated poems which operate quite like photographs, as if they were not put together of words at all.

In fact, it is remarkable how Chinese poems seem to breathe lived life, not speak in abstractions as so much of western poetry.

And this is even more remarkable when you note that Gongsun Long (ca. 325–250 BC) pondered questions which western logicians and set theorists invented much, much later.

The birch tree in winter

Street

Lake

Birches

Fence

Two weeks ago I used a line from Robert Frost's poem Birches as the title of a posting: "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree". And even though this poem is not too difficult to read, I wanted to look at a Finnish translation.

Finally I found a translation in a collection of American poems edited (and translated) by Ville Repo. And indeed, my impression of this poem was strengthened when reading the translation; it is powerful and deep. But it is also different, an interpretation.

For those who know Finnish, here is the end of the poem, translated by Ville Repo, from the book Tähtien väri: valikoima amerikkalaista runoutta (WSOY, 1992; ISBN 951018408X):

Tahtoisin nousta mustat oksat latvaan
valkoisen rungon, kohti taivasta,
kunnes puu taipuisi ja minut
laskisi maahan. Mennä, palata
tekisi hyvää. Aivan kelvollinen
olisi osa koivujen keinuttajan.

What I wonder is - compared to the difference in reading a poem in various languages - how much difference is there how we look at photographs? Has language anything to do with it?

A poet with the philosophy of a photographer

Flow

Reflect

Rowan

Puddles

Wind

Birch

Francesco asked yesterday why I so often use EV -0.66. I wrote an answer, but after thinking about it for a while I realized that wasn't quite right.

I wrote about low-key photographs, but that is a bit different matter. The fact is, I prefer a bit darker look to the photographs. Maybe I have a darker world-view than the average.

Today I finally used EV -1 as the default, as it was so dark. I thought that as it is dark then the photographs should show it.

And I was also pushing the limits of the LX5, using ISO 500 and still needing occasionally exposures up to 1.6 seconds. Rather long for handheld shooting! The results are of course not sharp, but who cares?

Speaking of hands, I read somewhere that "humans are dogs with hands", that is we are pack animals who need a leader, or someone to look up to, as may have been the case with Steve Jobs. Andreas wrote a good posting about him.

But we also like to use our hands, it makes us happy.

Recently an English-speaking colleague asked me at lunch: "Are you a good cook?" I had to answer: "No, I'm not."

However, I engage regularly in kitchen activities, as we eat most days a family dinner at home. As I'm not a culinarist, I use an approach where I try to make preparing food easy for me.

And although I'm not a good cook, at least the ground beef sauce for macaroni disappears fast. Maybe the children have adapted to tolerating the taste, though.

Today we had chicken fajitas, which is an easy dish to make, and it also disappeared fast from the table. While preparing food I realized that although I'm not an enthusiast about cooking, the routines of preparing a family dinner do have a calming influence after a busy day at work.

Taking photographs is also an activity that engages the hands. Maybe this is another reason why it feels so good?

By the way, the Nobel Prize in Literature was today awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. I read an analysis (in Finnish) about his work, and what caught my interest was the comparison of his work to photographs, "a poet with the philosophy of a photographer".

Tranströmer's poems seem to be build on the idea of a photograph. Thus the poem gets the background from the experience of the reader, combining different aspects of time, activating the memory and asking questions about what was not shown.

I haven't read any of his poems, but I think he is worth looking into.

Reading tanka poems and pondering darkness

Reed

Pond

Maple

Street

Foliage

Hazel

Today I was reading a collection of tanka poems, translated into Finnish by Tuomas Anhava during 1960-1982. Even though the Japanese originals are impossible to fully translate, Anhava (who is a poet) has managed to make the translations into works of art.

Some tanka poems are such that they almost feel like photographs. Perhaps this type of poetry is the closest words can come to the art of photography?

We organized today a birthday party, and thus I was unable to go for a walk until it started to get dark. Here is a selection of nightly photographs, most are processed from RAW files.

While working with the RAW files I noticed that my standard preset for RAW conversion doesn't work too well with night-time photographs, so there is some experimentation (and learning) to be done.