Category: NFN

Having spent a considerable part of my life in editing, both photography and text, I do believe in the grueling necessity of it. This obviously includes my own photography. The editing may be even more important than taking the images in the first place. I am convinced that no matter how good you may be, if you choose the wrong images, the result will be mediocre at best. Hence, although I have edited roughly two million images of other people over the past ten years, I don’t ever do the final edit of my own work – you just can’t edit your own images with a 100 percent success rate. But you can choose people who are good at it (and avoid those who are not).

All this, unfortunately, also means that I’m not going to publish some really nasty observations from my plane trip back to New York. I had already written them up in great, germ dripping detail. While I have, at times, a weak spot for observations concerning the abysses of human behavior, my poor copy editor now thinks she can’t eat for a couple of days, after reading the draft of what I still consider to be a very noteworthy blog entry about the passenger on seat 24 D on an undisclosed flight to New York this past Sunday. Well.

Meanwhile, I’m working on nearly two gigabytes of raw files from the Italian Alps. I’m trying to chase these through Photoshop before the virus that I probably caught on that plane gets me… but I say no more.

The complete new series soon, here, I hope…

For better or worse, a considerable chunk of my life is tied to academia. For me, this Monty Python philosophy world cup soccer video is as close as anybody has ever come to an accurate portrait of it.

While Monty Phython, for dubious reasons, lets the Germans loose this one, I have always (again, for dubious reasons?) admired the following quote by Maggie Thatcher on soccer and the Germans: “You may beat us at our favorite game every time, but twice in a century we beat you, at your favorite game.”

And further on admiration: “War All The Time” is the title of a poem by Charles Bukowski, about his mailman being somewhat startled at finding the author in his garden, watering the plants. Bukowski looks up and casually remarks: “Well, as you see, it’s not war all the time…”. Somehow, that spoke to me.

A funny read from last week, in case you missed it: “Stock Imagery Takes A Turn” (via Andy Goetze). While not exactly about “imagery”, the article indulges in the latest round of image licensing smart talk. Here’s a banal thought: While all the different licensing models discussed in that article are good, not all licensing models discussed in that article are good for everybody. Or was that what the Dalai Lama said about Buddhism?

Not all is all that bad with image licensing though. Be greeted from the slopes of the Italian Alpery.

(These are from a new series I’m working on. More soon.)