Kia ora tatou:

Time for a Sermon on the Mount.

On Monday night I had the singular honour of being asked to judge the Canterbury Roundup, an interclub battle for projected Images, along with Ian Smith (ex-Photo Access) and Linda Lee, a Fine Art photography teacher from Christchurch. Nice to see clubs looking for input from people outside the system. Widening the range of inputs can only be good for photography as a whole and for enlarging our awareness of the possibilities the medium can offer. CPS came first (again), followed by Rangiora (YAAY!- No, I am not being parochial-much) and then Kaiapoi. Congratulations.

On that subject, I want to raise (and hopefully dispel) a common fallacy: that professionals are better photographers  than amateurs.

Wrong. They are the same, only different. I have seen work from amateur photographers that had a long way to go. And I have been asked to explain ” this depth-of-field thing” to a professional who was making $80k a year, shooting families, weddings and children. A professional makes his/her living from photography. As such, he/she is driven by client expectations. An amateur photographs for the love of it. We are all amateurs. Or we should be. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Continuing the theme of Christmas on the Ezine…

Garry sent in this image, shot at the Christchurch Santa Parade on 2 Dec.

This guy is really enjoying himself…..

Somehow this image brings a few words to mind…

Every Who
Down in Who-ville
Liked Christmas a lot…

But the Grinch,
Who lived just North of Who-ville,
Did NOT!

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be that his head wasn’t screwed on quite right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

You can read the rest here

Kia ora tatou:

I will shortly remove the Your Images page. There are a number of treasons for this (no, not a typo!):

1. I am about to (hopefully) replace it with a dialogue, along the lines of Letter to Marthinus
2. Leaving the images in the main body of the post allows you to make comments on it more easily

To that end, I have created a new category, Your images.

And what better way to kick it off than this one….

Alan Blacklock, an enormously-talented and skilled photographer for NIWA in Wellington and a contributor to the Ezine under various pseudonyms, was sitting in his backyard, dreaming of a gift-wrapped haggis, a new sporran and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, when he looked up and spotted this cloud passing by. He has obviously been a good boy in 2007!

And No, he did not PhotoShop it (see previous post). He is a purist….

Editorial Correction:

BTW It was deep fried haggis, a velveteen sporran and Laphroiag that was going through my mind at the time.