Merry Christmas 2009

cookies

Enjoy the time off, spend it with your family & friends, don’t be irrtated by all the red and the obligations that come with christmas, after all you should simply spread some love, bake a few cookies even though they are unhealthy and just have a good time.
Enjoy the holidays & take care,
Sven

Taking time to perfect the theme

This theme is just running since the middle of april, so I finally took the time to even out a few bugs. You can’t do that fast enough. It’s just 8 months and no one complainded, which just underlines that there are only people trying to get their link on my site when they post their comments.
Content related changes hit the info text on the right side, the subheadline (that is not even displayed on this site as I did not incorporate the call in the design, but hey, never judge a book by it’s cover ;) ) and furthermore I reduced the titel to “living in svensworld”, as this is what the blog is all about.

Refined Comments

The comments had no background, so they were kinda hard to read, I changed the commenting policy, so you can still post comments on recent posts, but you can’t post comment on posts older than 14 days. Happy time. I added a different, even more in the face than before introduction to the comments. Maybe some people will take time to read it before they attempt to spam. Still I really enjoy deleting the hand written spam, as it takes more time for them writing it than for me deleting.

The plans

You can always tweak and rework a site until you have enough, but after all this design is still lovely. *patting my own shoulder* The only improvement that is on sight for this blog is a higher posting frequency. Which will do more than any redesign could do.

being bad at something does not make you a professional

A few weeks ago I have been reading a post over about how photographers are very often only part-time employed as they have a very hard job, or rather have a hard time making money with it. This is only partly true, there are simply a lot of people who know how to use a camera, but know next to nothing about taking good, or respectively unique pictures. They are taking snapshots.

The woman writing this article lacks one quality. By telling us that it’s hard to find a job as a photographer she lacks one thing, taking great, and I mean great as in I would by this, pictures.
I can understand that it’s hard for her to find jobs photographing. I don’t want to sound offending or rude, but it’s annoying that everyone who owns a camera thinks of himself as a photographer. It takes a little bit more than that. And while it is rude to disrespect her works, it’s far more interesting that noone seems to care about quality when it comes to such a thing as design or photography.

At my job I have to fix so many pictures (”Make this look good” – A group shot where the background is sharp and no face.), there is one substitute for good photos, editing them for hours, you can fix a few flaws, but bad perspective and boring motives are not that easy to repair. Instead of telling people it is hard to find a job as a photographer, she would be better of reducing her mediocre portfolio (most pictures there are mediocre at best from a professional aspect) and only putting up good works. If that is too hard it would probably be better to simply start over and make a few better pictures(see darren rowes digital photography school). There are so many amazing pictures over at whatever stock site you find, it’s hard to compete against those guys if you are not shooting technically perfect pictures.

Everybody has to start somewhere, but it takes work and persitence to improve to a level where you can make money with it. As quality still matters, or you can depend on pictures taken by your relatives. Start taking unique pictures, stand out of the crowd.