Put me on the map

I've been fiddling around a bit with putting some landscape pictures on the map--the world map of Panoramio, that is. Fun to see where I've been, how others saw the same environment, and realising that other people watch your pictures with--I guess--a similar interest. It took me some time to find out how it works, especially with the labels: first create a label, then click the option 'Apply' and only then click on the picture(s) to which it applies; I kept wanting to clik pictures before saying 'apply'.
What I also find cool is to see the EXIF-details of others' pictures: once you click on a picture in Google Maps or Panoramio, it pops up and if you click on it a couple times more, you get to a page with details of maker & location, and also there is a thingy with "further detailis". If you click on that, you get to see the make of the camera, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, ISO setting and use of flash. Can be interesting to learn how they did it.
The downside of putting pictures on the Google maps used to be, I thought, that you have to wait for ages for pictures to get selected for Google Earth (which is true). But through the Panoramio community and/or Google Maps, you get 'hits' quite a bit faster than that. And isn't instant gratification an important stimulus to keep going? OK, now that I seen that my photos are seen a handful of times already within a week, I'll keep going and upload a few more pictures from more exotic locations than Twente or Ameland.
But before I do that: I really want to get the copyright notice into my pictures again. So after my recent laptop crash I'll have to download that bit of shareware software, Bildschuetz Pro (also available in english) again for doing that, without having to go all the way to Photoshop. It's easy to use, once you have found the c-with-a-circle in your word processor; MS-Word's aoutocorrect function does it automatically if you type in "(c)" and undoubtedly Open Office has a similar trick, but then again, so does the software itself, if you don't destroy the automatic settings: use "%(c)%".
A disadvantage of putting in a copyright notice in a JPG-photo is that with every time you save a JPG, it is compressed anew and that diminishes the quality somewhat. For 'serious' photos I would find that a real drawback, but for web pictures it is not a problem--if anyone is interested in getting a high-quality print or copy, they can always contact me. Yes, this is an invitation ;-)
By way of example: Below is Taiwan's Sun-Moon Lake, clearly one to put on the map!

Zen and the art of landscape photography

The title's joke is over 30 years old now, as Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance' dates from the early 1970s. And there must be hundreds of variants of 'Zen and...' by now. And still it gives the best possible introduction to my theme of today--sorry it's been so long since I wrote, but you know how it is with holidays: it's a time of fun but not a time for serious photography. And time is the essence--the essence of Zen and the essence of photography. Well, of landscape photography anyway. Or maybe I'd better say the negation of time. As Pirsig had it, in his book: when he wanted to get a motorcycle in the 1960s, they were not to be had in the USA, and he ordered a self-assembly kit motorbike in Japan. The manual for putting the thing together was--as then and now only too usual--badly translated. It said that the assembly of the bike "needs great peace of mind". This meant, of course, "needs patience". But on another level the bad translation was perfect: you do need "great peace of mind" to achieve something good.

So to make a good landscape picture you need to take time, a lot of time. The point is not if your shutter speed is 1/2000 of a second. The time I mean is time you take to get a feel that says "this is the picture to take". That message was brought home in an interview in the August copy of Outdoor Photography with Anna Booth, who is an amateur photographer like the rest of us. Yet unlike, for she will be exhibiting 4 by 5 foot (1.2 by 1.5 meter) pictures in the UK. (That is what the magazine promises--the gallery's website is not running yet.) And the pictures shown in the magazine I find stunning: simple colours, simple patterns of landscape details, and all amazingly sharp. Even in the magazine reproductions you can see that. The sharpness comes from her pictures being taken with a 5x4 inch camera, with real film of course, nothing digital. The magic is not so much in film vs. digital, but in the time needed. You must take time to carry such a big camera around, to set it up on its tripod, and to make sure that everything is correct before you risk to spend a large sheet of film material on a picture. The bulkiness of the camera--and Anna's own personality, as she says--ensure that she concentrates often on a single spot: "I get hours of pleasure from a single location and, sometime, one shot". OK, looking around at one spot is a bit of "peace of mind", but the really interesting remark she makes is that: "it usually takes me a couple of days, before I can start to see any images." She must reach a state of "peace of mind" before she can really concentrate enough--and then a split second can be enough for the shutter to do its part of the work.

You see now why in this time of year I cannot take serious pictures? Worse than that: do I ever take the time to really let my mind get "peace" in order to become receptive to my environment in a photographic way? On the other hand: do you really need very much time to reach the right, receptive stage of mind? In a tour I did, early this year, of the Buddhist Chung Tai Chan monastery in Taiwan, the nun who showed us around (she is in the picture to the right) told us that an experienced person can meditate in every circumstance and at any time. It is only us, beginners, she added, who need mantras, mandalas, monasteries. The really experienced photographers may see their picture at once, may be able to visualise (to use Ansel Adam's term) anytime and anywhere. I am like Anna Booth and need time to free my mind from other things to be able to concentrate on the landscape.

The contrast between reaching "great peace of mind" and the split-second action of photography is much like the "way" of Japanese archery, kyudo. Once you have reached the right state of mind, and you master your bow/camera to perfection, making a hit/perfect picture becomes natural, effortless, and certain. Keep trying! One day everything will come together.

And then you will be able to make a much better version of my try of the spirit of the landscape at the foot of Mount Fuji. Until then: enjoy this one!

New slideshow

OK, it's not a major contribution, but I have changed the slideshow in the sidebar to another album. This month, it's travel photography you can see, made earlier in 2008 in Taiwan (cities of Taipeh, Tainan and Puli with the Sun-Moon Lake).

For major contributions, I need more time off from work. Stay tuned, it'll come...

What are you looking at?

Let's get back to basics, before we wander further off into the realm of estethics: photos are meant to communicate. I want to show you something, but as communication theory discovered, and as postmodernists made popular, the three elements sender - message - receiver are different. What are my intentions? What is embodied in the message? What do you see?

Most of us think of words or text, when we think about communication. Like this text. That is a difficult enough medium to pass a message from me to you. Quoting Karel van het Reve again: 'it's impossible to write so clearly that you are not misunderstood.' In my work, which involves writing a lot of texts, I am acutely aware of that and I try to write clearly, I repeat my message in different words, I use 'metatext' to tell readers what I intend to do, what I am going to do, and I summarise to tell them what they should have remembered from the previous section. For the attentive reader there is redundancy in the text, and 'tedium' (as my former colleague Guy Neave once called all the reasonings and references that make up so much of social science writing). And still people quote me wrongly! Or students don't understand and they fail for their exam. Sad, isn't it?



One of our famous sayings is that a picture says more than a thousand words. That would mean that an average scientific journal article of about 6,000 words could be replaced by 5 or 6 pictures. My problem is that with a picture, I don't know which 1,000 words I've captured! I know, of course, that something in a situation caught my attention, fired a signal in my brain that 'this is a nice picture!', and triggered my finger to push the button. What caught my attention, why was this man with dog a nice picture? I think, looking at it a few weeks after taking the photo in Taiwan, that it was the contrast of the large man's head and the little dog, the fact that the dog was being carried instead of running on all fours along the pavement, and finally the curious yet friendly way both man and dog looked up to me as I held the camera aiming at something behind them (a garden, now no longer in the picture). Those are three potential messages in 55 words (way less than 1,000). Is it one of the three, or the combination of all three those messages, that makes this into a good photo to you? Or do you read something else in it that I did not intentionally put into it?
Reactions are invited!