Happy New Year!!

The human civilization is filled with very strange things if you really think about it.  I'm talking about human versus the other species of animal on earth, and there is no other kind of animal that artificially looks at time as fragments instead of a continuum.  I mean, other than the day is clearly defined by the passing of daylight and darkness of the night, the month, and the year, and of course the decade and the century and the millennium are all artificial.  To all other animals, today is just the passing of another intertwined daylight and darkness, but to the civilized human, today marked the beginning of another new year, and people are doing all sorts of weird things just to celebrate the passing of the minute from 2011 to 2012.  Imagine all the collective "waste" of energy spent on something collectively "useful", how much will that contribute towards the betterment of the humankind.
No, I'm not here to preach, but just a weird way of saying:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

After the hiatus of over a month, I'm returning to this blog, hoping to keep it going again as I had promised myself when I first started this.  

New direction? What new direction?  

When I stopped at the 300th post, I was saying I would need to redefine a new direction for this blog, and here we go, the new direction is.......... there will be no direction.  I had been keeping to the same format throughout the 300 posts and I could have been too boring, especially when I restrained myself to talk about the daily photo and nothing else, kind of..... Photography is a very strange activity -- there are photographers (here loosely defined as any one who takes pictures consciously) who are still using their age-old camera of yesteryear, and there are those who are hopping between cameras and even platforms every now and then, and there are those who talks more about equipment than taking pictures.  

I'm no exception.  I'm just a regular geek (really?) who salivate over every introduction of new camera and lens.  I had buried my instinct over the last 300 posts and I'm not going to restrain myself any more.  And that's my point of "having no direction".  The general direction is I'll talk about anything about photography, period.

Yesterday I helped a 14-year-old niece unwrap one of her Christmas presents -- it was a gift-pack lomograph camera.  It's not the real lomograph brand, it is actually a Diana type camera with a book, instructions, a flash and 2 packs of film -- 3-roll packs of color negative and B/W. Her mother found this very nicely packed gift box set with a very deep discount, and without knowing what it is, just got it for her daughter as a very good looking Christmas present.  Honestly, it is going to be a disaster, because I myself found it very difficult even to load the film, not to say advancing the film and remembering what to do after each exposure.  But I found it very intriguing, for myself, to start explaining everything about the camera, the film, the ISO value....... Make me feel like starting up a photography course for kids.  I mean, photography, or to be exact, taking pictures, for a kid of 14 years (or anyone who doesn't care), is about pointing the device to the object and pressing a certain button, and the image shows up right away and you either discard or keep and then you move on...... Be honest, I had been using my smart phone for those occasions when a "camera" wasn't at hand and I had to take that "alien landing" picture.  But I got frustrated for not knowing the focal length, shutter speed, aperture (well, does it really matter if you know?), ISO value and exposure compensation....... I admit I had some really nice "alien landing" pictures, and I had commented that these were good enough pictures, but wouldn't it be more complete if anyone serious enough to take pictures know exactly what they are doing? Maybe I don't belong to today -- there are people who are using the computer everyday who don't have a meagre idea of the directory tree file structure, and there had been gazillion drivers who didn't have any idea of the internal combustion engine lurking in their car they drive everyday...... Oh well....

Play

The daily picture is still an important feature, although I would not promise the "daily" part.  here is a not-so-serious picture taken with a "add-on fisheye" lens, i.e., it isn't a true fisheye lens, but an attachment over a wide angle lens that gives you the effect of a fisheye lens.  I just played with it, and the contrasting light and shadow and shapes.... kept me having fun for well over 20 minutes just at this spot.