As if I needed another hobby ...

Look3, the third annual Festival of the Photograph, is going on here right now. It's a pretty amazing event that I haven't really taken part in before. Actually, I'm not really taking part in it in a big way this year, but if there's a Look4 next year, I just might. Today I took in one exhibit, World Press Photo '09. World Press Photo is an independent nonprofit supporting and promoting the work of professional press photographers. For 2009, 5,508 photographers from 124 countries entered a total of 96,268 images. The exhibit is of the 200 winning pictures in 10 theme categories such as nature photography, sports news, etc. I was blown away by the exhibit. There were several images, one in particular of a soldier with the most penetrating stare, that kept calling me back for one more look.

There is another exhibit called YourSpace to which anyone can submit a photo to be professionally printed by Canon and then put on exhibit. You don't need to be registered for the festival to take advantage of this, so I took a photo in today. Had I known that the limit for non-festival folks was one photo per day rather than one for the whole festival, I'd have taken another one in yesterday. As it is, I'll try to get another one printed tomorrow. The range of works displayed in the YourSpace exhibit is pretty amazing. Some are by professional photographers. Others are by very serious amateurs. A few are by people like me. I must admit that I got a bit of a rush seeing my photo hanging up there with the others. It almost looked as if it belonged.

So what photo did I take in? Readers of my Sail A-Hue, my trip blog, might think it was the photo that I said blew me away when I first saw it. It wasn't because there was a photo I took later that, like the one of the soldier I mentioned above, has continued to call me back to it. Interestingly, it was not one I put up on Sail A-Hue since the posts at the end were sort of rushed. It was one of the first shots I took early one morning in Trondheim, Norway, as we walked around the harbor area. Seeing the photo last night, the husband commented that it showed the color of Norway (many of the houses are the shade of red shown in the photo) as well as the darkness. That's an interesting interpretation, but I don't know if that's why I keep going back to the photo. You tell me. As for the title of this post, I must admit to several moments of thinking that I really should get back to taking photography seriously, working at the shots I take both before, in terms of conscious thought about the composition, lighting, etc., and after, in terms of touching up things like the slight angle the photo above is off by. But do I really need another hobby that can require nontrivial amounts of time and money? Probably not, but then that hasn't necessarily stopped me in the past. I'll just have to wait and see if the urge passes or persists, and then take it from there.