I picked up on a new website today "Focus", which seems to have just got started and presents a couple very well produced and interesting video documentaries about two leading lights of Flickr. The first is about macro photographer, Brian Valentine. The second is about the prolific Icelandic photographer, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir. I actually discovered the site through Rebekka's blog, and this is where the strange doings come in (cue creepy Twilight Zone sounds). This evening I wanted to send my complements to the people at Focus, and went back to Rebekka's blog to find the link ... only to find the post has been airbrushed out of existence. It is still in my RSS reader archive though. I wonder why this is ... seems a very professional operation...although there is something a little strange, not to mention screwed up, with the Vimeo hosting. I think we should be told. UPDATE - well I have been told. Rebekka doesn't like the music and is unhappy about the edits, so she's decided to keep quiet about it. I can see what she means about the music, but I just tuned out.

One of the few positive side effects of being stuck at home with a stinking cold is that I can spend some time recovering some of the backlog of uploads I've been wanting to make to this site. So finally, I've selected 20 photos from last September in Sardinia, out of 300, and added them. You can see them in the Sardinia Gallery. It's getting more and more difficult to keep everything pointing in the same direction. I discovered that Mac OS X 10.5 (some cat or the other) has arbitrarily removed support for Image Capture scripting, so I had to delve back in the black hole of AppleScript - surely the most truly awful programming environment ever conceived - and work out how to use Image Events. Naturally, the logical approach didn't work, so as ever I had to find a workaround. Since I am now, for better or worse, using Lightroom for sorting and raw processing, I had to find a way of generating web images in the way I need them without first rendering the RAW files. I thought I'd hit upon a neat trick, using the fact that Bridge CS3 knows about colour labels I apply in Lightroom, and thus enabling me to pipe these to my Photoshop action, but, naturally, there was a glitch here too: seems you can only have one folder at a time open in Bridge, and Lightroom organises files (as I told it to) in multiple folders. I may be wrong about this - Bridge is nothing if not obscure - but it does look like Bridge really is absolutely hopeless as anything much behind a pointless file browser replacement. Then there is the sneaking feeling that Lightroom maybe isn't the optimum way to process RAW images. I don't know. I like the adjustment tools and the highlight recovery in Lightroom, and some of the browsing tools, although the rest, in my opinion, is a clumsy mess, probably the result of trying too quickly to be master of all trades. The problem is that Lightroom does offer, in theory, a very nice integrated solution, unlike anything else other than Aperture. Amazing really - as soon as I find a bit of time to get back to photography, it is immediately sucked up by keeping up to date with the software. Still, I quite like some of the Sardinia photos.

Well, I finally picked up an Olympus E-3 a week ago. I immediately compared ergonomics with a D300 (E3 viewfinder is better) and a 40D ("Tonka Toy" comes to mind), and it feels good, BUT it doesn't have the "take me home" gut feel I got from the E-1. Whatever. I thought a bit about the lens issue, and decided that the 12-60 doesn't have compelling arguments for me over the 11-22 & 14-54 I already have. So I decided to go and get the E-3 body. Whilst I was waiting for an assistant, I started to think a bit.... does it really have much to offer over the E-1 & E-400 I already have ? E-400 gives me 10Mpix. E-1 gives me all weather capability, and prints up to A3 (I doubt I'll ever need bigger). Almost all of my "ok" shots (I haven't progressed to "good" yet) are taken on tripod, so IS is of little use to me. LV would be useful sometimes, I think, although I'm not certain. The 30 min exposure would be a definite plus, if the noise is controlled enough (and no reviewer has even mentioned this yet).... So, on balance, I wondered would that E-3 improve my photography, or enjoyment of photography ? The answer, clearly, was "unlikely". And so I walked out of shopping therapy.

Well, this, I have to say, was totally unexpected. A few weeks ago, I received an email from Alice Burton, of the British photo magazine Outdoor Photography. She told me she wanted to make this site "website of the month". I was pretty stunned. First, because the sheer quality of the 3 or 4 sites featured monthly is pretty intimidating. Secondly, because the photo part of this site has been in practical hibernation for over a year. But it's true. And here's the proof: I've been reading OP since pretty much issue 1. But I never thought I'd get anywhere near being featured in their pages. So, just for this one post, please forgive me if I'm just a little bit unsufferably pleased with myself. Wait a minute... it's not the April 1st edition is it ?

This review is very, very overdue, but maybe with Christmas coming up, it isn't so badly timed. I have written about Alessandra Meniconzi before, and reviewed her first book, The Silk Road. This, her second major publication, is also the fruit of several years of hard work (maybe not quite so hard, or quite so many, as for The Silk Road, but probably considerably wetter!). This time Alessandra turns her focus on Iceland, which is pretty much guaranteed to get my attention.



"Mystisches Island", to give it its German title, is a collection of photographs spanning pretty much all of Iceland, both from the ground and the air, often battling against Iceland's worst weather, and indeed taking advantage of it.

Iceland is becoming a more and more popular subject for photographers, including a growing number of very talented native Icelanders. So what can another book bring to the market ? Well, in this case, a lot. Iceland is, often, spectacular, and any competent photographer should be able to bring home a few attention grabbing images. But that isn't what we have here. Somehow these photographs convey a strong sense of place, of fascination, and involvement. They don't feel like they were taken with an audience in mind, but more like from a strong, personal passion for the place, the people, and its stories. They are photographs that demanded to be made, publication or no publication. Although these photographs are principally landscapes, there is often a strong sense of narrative within them. I could not say if it is conscious or not, but a handful of the photos also seem to pay tribute to some of Iceland's leading photographers, including Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson and Ragnar Axelsson.

I guess in some ways this book appeals to me because I know a lot of these places, and have tried, not very successfully, to take some of these photographs myself. It is a bit weird when another photographer manages to take pretty much the same photo as me, only considerably better.

It is difficult to pick out a favourite from the book's 120 or so photos, but this one has a particular appeal to me...

photo © Alessandra Meniconzi

..the space, the emptiness, the timelessness, the colour - and of course the sheep - these are all elements that make Iceland what it is.

And this leads me to my one criticism of the book: the title. To me, "Mystical Iceland" sounds a bit "new age", and undersells the book. Maybe "Elemental Iceland" would be more appropriate. That's what it feels like to me.

"Mystisches Iceland" is very highly recommended (could you guess?), and is published with German text by Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-7822-0951-9. I believe an English version is in planning, but I haven't seen it yet. Alessandra has also published a 2008 calendar featuring her Icelandic photography (ISBN-10: 3765446734, ISBN-13: 978-3765446733), but this too is unfortunately elusive.