Keen Eye

Many of you have subscribed to the feed of this blog. You may have been wondering why there’ve beem no new posts lately. The reason is, it’s just too hard to keep two blogs going at the same time. My blogging competes with all my other interests, none the least being photography. So I decided to merge this blog with Schauplatz.org. In this, my German photography blog, I installed a plugin which allows me to translate my posts on a post-by-post basis. I translate most, if not all of them.

So what do you have to do? Go to Schauplatz.org and click on the little US flag on the top right-hand corner of each post. Thus you will get to see the English-language version of the post. Or point your feedreader at this address. This feed normally contains the English and German version of the post, at least of those posts I have translated. Please try it and let me know whether it works.

Much of the navigation on Schauplatz.org is in German. Please let me also know if you’d prefer it in English. Most of it, I should think, explains itself, but I may have to change some of it to make it more useful for you. And now: good bye, Keen Eye, and hello, Schauplatz!

Schauplatz, by the way, means location, scene or setting in English. None of the translations, though, cover the visual aspect of the German expression which is composed, literally, of “schau” (schauen = to look) and Platz (= place, square). It is, in other words, the place where you can look for inspiring content about photography and the art of seeing. Enjoy!

In early January, on the occasion of visiting an old friend from my home-town of Göttingen in Lower Saxony, I took a stroll along my old favourite walk from back when I used to live in Diemarden, a village in the rural outskirts of Göttingen. I took a camera on this fine winter afternoon and took some photographs:

Just a grassy slope with a fence

A nuthatch enjoying the afternoon sun

Beech wood ready for sawing

More beech trees, confering about how to avoid being slain

My favourite walk towards the hilltop

Looking across the hill towards the road to Niedernjesa

These images mean a lot to me because I just love those quiet hills and those forests filled with light. Maybe some of you out there also enjoy them!

What is this?

A picture puzzle for you

The image has been gently optimized but not any way distorted. Puzzle away, please!

Brian Auer of EpicEdits and Martin Gommel of Kwerfeldein.de have set up a joint project: Authors of photography blogs and photo-sharing sites were asked to submit a self-portrait showing themselves and their camera. The resulting mosaic of 66 faces has now been published on EpicEdits, and an awesome list it has become. Some of my “colleagues”, as yet largely unknown to me, have gone to some lengths to come up with a really creative idea for their self-portraits.

Great socializing of photographers

I like the idea behind this project of bringing together people with similar interests, of showing the face behind the photography. It may come as a surprise, for instance, that the guy with the awesome, cold, lonely landscape pictures seems to be a really outgoing kind of person – an example I made up, but you “get the picture”. I’m sure some of us who took part (I published my self-portrait over at Schauplatz.org) will connect, visit each other frequently, get to talk and maybe even meet in real life!

My favourite Faces of Photography

At any rate, I’m going to try and extract those self-portraits from the lot that interest me most. I don’t really see the point of publishing exactly the same selection of portraits on every blog, thereby duplicating content 66 times. My choice, however, has nothing to do with what I think of the person’s photography. It’s just to do with whether or not I like their self-portrait (idea, technique, colors …), whether find it funny, original or touching.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this randomness thing working. Order of appearing thus does not imply order of excellence nor order of anything. Here goes:

BLOGGER FACES

PHOTO-SHARING FACES

Hey, Mark Carmody, you cheated, you didn’t shoot yourself! Booh!

Thanks again, Brian and Martin, to set up this thing, it has been lots of fun!

And to everyone who participated: I’ll be glad to welcome you on my site, get in touch, etc. I haven’t even started browsing your sites, but I will, promise. This site Keen Eye, by the way, is my English photography blog; there’s more content on Schauplatz which has also been linked in the project.