Every now and then I run into a song that I *have* to listen to over and over again without getting sick of it. Strasbourg / St. Denis is one of those. My music taste could probably be described as eclectic, and this kind of jazz definitely has a place in my heart, and I'd love to play the bass on this song with a good band one day.

So without further ado here is Roy Hargrove (this is only an audio track, but YouTube was the only place I could find it in an embeddable form)

By the way, I bought the entire album without listening to any of the other tracks, just based on this one song.

Picture: typographica.org

Do photography and typograhy have more in common than the "ography"?

I remember back in high school I used to doodle my own fonts on checkered paper instead of paying attention to the math lessons. And not just individual letters, I drew entire alphabets. Numbers and special characters and all. Many of them were quite similar, rather geometric, and I distinctively remember trying to make them look well balanced and getting the distance between the individual letters right.

This all came back when I ran across an article on typographica.org titled Making Geometric Type Work.

I knew almost nothing about typography back in high school, and it was years later that I started to read up on the subject. However, what I did know was what I liked. And I tried to figure out why I liked things.

Typography is everywhere. Look around you, the world would be quite a different place if you removed all the written words from it.

Typography is about design as much as it is about helping to convey messages. If you talk to type designers, you'll hear them use words like balance, width, joins, alignment, spacing - the exact same terms that we photographers use in the context of image composition.

And yes, it isn't that much of a difference - actually learning about typography and other visual media will inevitably influence the way you compose your pictures. Mind you, not always in a conscious way. I often catch myself almost accidentally having applied some of these principles when I revisit my images later.

Having made these principles conscious while learning about typography has helped slip them into my subconscious without me even knowing it.

And when I notice the results, it makes me smile.

Do you have anything visual that influences your photography? Let me know in the comments.

We're going back to the Himalayas next spring. To be precise, we are going to see Kathmandu, Lhasa, the north side Everest Base Camp, and the east side of Mt. Everest.

We are not doing this alone, we will take a group of 15 photographers. The last trek has been an unforgettable adventure for me. This was my first time in Asia and I have returned with an enormous amount of new impressions and pictures. And I can't wait for the next trek to start!

I also wish I had taken the picture in this post. Well, I haven't, she has. You can't have everything, can you?

Let's analyze it.

For me this is a great example of a glimpse into the every-day life of a different culture. My eyes first get drawn in to the brighter areas of the picture, and to the places where contrasts are. I then start to explore and take in the scene and the meaning of what I'm seeing. A woman bending down, apparently busy washing something. Took me a few seconds to realize that she's actually washing a carpet. With a bowl of water. On the ground.

And all of a sudden there is this colorful story that starts to emerge in my mind. Why is she washing a carpet? Doesn't she have a vacuum cleaner? Most likely not. Vacuum cleaners are expensive where she lives. Electricity is either sparse or at least not reliable at all. Can't she put the carpet into her washing machine? Oh wait, same issues.

At the same time these thoughts are going through my mind, I keep exploring the image, I notice the beautiful reflections in the foreground, I realize that the ground behind the carpet is dry, so it wasn't rain that got the ground wet, it all comes from the carpet cleaning. Does she do that every week? Every month? Is the carpet something of value for them and is that why she carefully cleans it? Or was it just necessary because it had become too dirty?

And then there are the very formal image criteria. Subject? Check. (The woman). Placement? Off center. Leaves space for the great reflections. And gives the lines in the pavement the function to lead your eyes back up to the subject. Foreground/background separation? Works nicely.

Have you ever washed a carpet? How do you go about analyzing images? Do you spend time to think about them? Let us know in the comments!