City lights

I've passed this motif many times this winter without a tripod with me. Tonight I saddled up and went straight there. :-)

Pentax K-7, DA 21/3.2 ltd, tripod
30s, f/5.6, ISO 100

The place is the Northern end of Lake Alunsjøen where the skiing track comes down to cross over the ice. The city, and my house, is behind the low hill at the far end. When the sky is overcast like tonight, there's more light in the forest than by the light of the full moon.

Slide shows and music

I find fiddling slide shows to be great fun, except for one task. To select music to go with the slide shows. The clearer the vision of what I want, the harder it is to find. Fortunately, Magnatune exists. They let you listen to music without commiting your money, and let you buy a license to use a piece of music in your own creative projects. All directly from the website; and at a very reasonable price. I think this is important. If we, as photographers, want others to respect the difference between hanging our picture on their wall and using our picture in their own publications/creations, we should honour the same for composers/musicians. Obtaining such rights, however, tend to be either prohibitively expensive or bureaucratically difficult.

One argument against Magnatune is that they are the microstock of music, underselling the true value of the music.

Personally I feel caught in the middle. I think it's great to have the possibility to buy music licenses within my modest budget. On the other hand I think microstock is underselling images.

Anticlimax

So I had this trip of a lifetime. Coming back to the daily routine didn't feel good at all. I think, in fact, that there are both psychological and purely biological reasons for that. An example of the latter is the abrupt change in daylength. We went from 17-18 to 6-7 hours of daylight, and got 4 hours of timezone difference between Argentina and Europe free in the bargain. It wreaked havoc on my circadian rhythm.

But now I'm sipping my coffee, thinking about how the solstice is behind us and light is returning to the Northern hemisphere. Literally brighter times ahead for me. And the mountain of images to be sorted, tagged, described by keywords, and finally developed, is reduced to a more manageable size. Not through yet, but sort of glimpsing the end of it ahead.


The promised article on K-7 AF performance is still in the pipelines, but will materialise. Eventually.

Meanwhile K-7 is becoming sort of old news, as the rumors of new releases in March are already floating on the forums. And the long anticipated medium format digital, of course, which was foreseen by Pentax to materialise in June this year.