Tuesday 1 January 2008

010108 : A New Year begins


Happy New Year to all!

As traditional as the rain falls over London, the 1st of January begins with the annual New Year's Day Parade in Central London. This year an estimated 300,000 visitors lined the streets from Parliament Square, up Whitehall, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly to see the many marching bands, vintage cars and bikes, clowns, lion dance, US cheerleaders and many, many more floats.


The weather was rather mild today, hovering around 9C, so it wasn't too wintery for the thousands of American school groups that came to perform. I even saw a school brass band from Honolulu! As we completely missed the fireworks on the river Thames last evening, I am pleased to have wandered along and watched the parade today. I noticed that almost every one now owns a point and shoot digital camera, the prices of these machines have fallen to less than £80 for a decent 8MP camera, and there is always an 'older' model to buy off eBay for even less money!


Despite this growth in ownership of digital cameras, the same old argument in consumer photography still exists, do you merely take a picture, or do you want to make a photograph? What does a photograph mean to you? Is it merely to record an event passing, to show a location, to capture something unique or beautiful? Why do we take photographs? Is it because we now can? If the camera did not exist, would we all be artists? Would we all be good at drawing?
Would our need to record the moment be subdued because of the less instantaneous process of drawing or painting?

How important are aesthetics and composition in your photographs? Are you aware of what you are photographing every time you press the shutter release?

I hope to ponder on these questions this coming year, as a long term thought process to share with you and hope to gain some answers with your help.


9 comments:

She's Jess said...

Happy New Year

svllee said...

Happy 2008 to you too Jess!

Anonymous said...

The picture of the three digital cameras is very interesting ,funny, and beautiful. Steven, you are a nice photographer. Vive le GRD2!
And A Very Happy New Year!

Anonymous said...

I was really fascinated with your photoes. How attractive they are! The color recalls me the days of London. I don't know why every color is so different from that of Tokyo!!! (Please forgive my broken English.)I'm a user of GRDII,and just want to tell you that I'm very happy to know your weblog. Thank you!

svllee said...

Hello Sustena, thank you for visiting! You are most welcome. You have an interesting blog and I didn't know so many people in Japan are using the GRD2? I was in Tokyo last October and I really like Japan. I want to comment on your blog but I can't seem to somehow.

Anonymous said...

WOW! Thank you very much for visiting my blog! In order to comment,just click "comments" which lies the bottom of the daily entry photoes.GRD2 is my first camera to show me the wonder of taking photoes.
PS:I Visited London 30 years ago.

svllee said...

Hello Sustena, I tried to post comments on your blog but I cannot understand Japanese, and when I click SEND, do I need to add anything / password in the left box? By the waym there is a Firmware update for the GRD2 from Ricoh.

Tracy Tan said...

hi ya steven! it's so frustrating to read blogs directly because the photos don't always load and it's pointless to visit your site if i can't see all the nice photos you upload! grrr...

but i will out of china for a while so i'm going to make the best of it and see all your photos :)

svllee said...

Sorry about that Tracy,is it because blogspot is blocked in China? There's no way around it? Your recent pictures were great, starting to get very arty! Keep it up. Cheers