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!

On the weekend, Monika and I shot a wedding. We usually don't do that for clients, but this one was different, as friends of ours got married. But what does it take to shoot a wedding? I actually get that question a lot. Most of the time the question comes in an email and it is phrased more like "What equipment do you recommend for shooting a wedding?"

[insert sound of alarm bell here] Wrong question. Entirely wrong question. If someone cooks a great meal for you, you don't compliment them on their pots and pans, now, do you? You don't need to know what word processing software (or what notepad and pen) your favorite authors use to write their books. You don't ask a painter what brushes they create their art with.

You enjoy the meal, the book, the painting for what it is.

Why is that so different in photography? "Wow, that's a big camera. You must take great pictures with it" is actually an insult. It de-values our creative side.

But don't worry, you're not alone, and if you are new to photography, it's very easy to fall for what the industry tells us. Which basically is this: Buy new gear from us and your pictures will be so much better.

Wrong, industry. Dead wrong! Some of the best pictures I've seen have been taken with (by today's standards) inferior equipment. A picture is maybe (if at all) 10 percent about the technical quality, about the image sharpness, about the lack of chromatic aberrations, about resolution and about the number of megapixels. 90 percent of the image is YOU. It's your eye, your sense of composition, your sense of placing things in the frame so they play with each other in a way that helps you bring out that image you had in your head before you pressed the shutter button. It's about timing too, actually one could argue that it might even be mostly about timing. Even in landscape photography, where the clouds have that tendency to not wait in that beautiful spot until you're finished setting everything up for the picture.

So I'm not blaming you for asking the equipment question. I'm blaming the industry. Heck, even I have fallen for it, buying things that I didn't need and that didn't benefit my photography at all. I'm just glad I haven't spent $150 on a white balance device yet. And probably never will. The good old grey card ($5.95), a sheet of white paper ($0.01), or even the good old Pringles lid (unfortunately they stopped making the opaque ones, but some yoghurt lids will do the trick too) are all it takes. Everything else is Voodoo unless you get paid big $$$ for a job and need to impress your customer, or unless you really need 100% color accuracy in product photography, for print, or in high profile fashion stuff. I don't need that accuracy. Our eyes aren't scientific measurement devices. They are much more easily influenced by the light conditions surrounding us, which is why you should try to edit your images in consistent surrounding light conditions, but I digress.

How did I get here? Oh, I know, we talked about how the industry makes us buy more and more stuff, and how we forget that photography is actually about learning to see, about anticipating how the viewer will look at our picture, what will make them explore our photograph in which way and how we can guide their eye to what we deem important in a picture.

Photography is about telling stories. Stories that have arches, tensions, reliefs, and in the end it's about one of the most basic things: it's about evoking emotion! If I look a picture and it moves me in one way or the other, I couldn't care less about the technical side of things.

When was the last time you've bought something for your photography that didn't help you at all? Let us know in the comments what that was.

No, it's not easy to make a first blog post into something interesting. Not that I think it has to be. It's mainly a post to test all the integrations and here we truly have a HUGE amount of stuff going on behind the scenes.

First there is a blog over at Blogger, Google's blogging service. This is the source that keeps the blog posts and where I edit the posts. How do they end up here? The key is integration. Loghound is a small company who writes awesome RapidWeaver plugins. Oh, I have to explain first that this website is made using RapidWeaver, a website development system. Pretty nifty, and I like it a lot. Anyway, back to Loghound, so they made this little plugin called Rapidblog and this in turn allows me to seamlessly integrate a Blogger blog here on the site. There's a huge advantage doing it this way: I get all the convenience from Blogger (such as posting via e-mail, editing it via Marsedit, which I'm in fact doing right now) and the seamless integration into my personal web site.

Admittedly, I make myself dependent on Blogger, but a) the service has been around for a long time and Google isn't about to go away any time soon and b) if my personal web server goes down or gets hacked (which is more likely than Google's service going down) then I have a fallback, because I could simply send you over to the original Blogger blog, which doesn't look nearly as cool, but which does the trick.

But we're not finished yet with the integrating. Did I mention that I *LOVE* social media? Instead of using the Blogger commenting system, Rapidblog allows me to integrate with the Disqus commenting system which totally embraces the Web 2.0 social way of doing things. Post about this blog post on Twitter, Wordpress.com or many other sites and these comments will automatically show up as comments here. Speak of a great integration. And all that with setting up a couple of accounts and a few mouse clicks to integrate things. That's the way a-ha a-ha I like it...

Let me know what you think about all this. Scary? Way cool? Leave a comment!