Great Inspiration!

I woke up this morning to my five-year-old son asking me if he could open the blinds because the sunrise was so beautifully orange. And he continued  explaining that you so rarely see orange color because for example trees are green and no one ever paints their house orange I think that was one of the most wonderful wake-up calls I’ve experienced. He likes to get up early and sometimes it can get a bit too much because my other son likes to stay up in the evenings. You know how some people are morning people and some people are evening people. Especially now that we have our holiday week, it’s sometimes really annoying that he wants to get up at six every morning. Despite all this I was delighted  to hear that the color orange was the first thing on his mind this morning – and not the legos he so desperately wants for his upcoming birthday that he even sleeps with the lego catalogue on his pillow.

I see there is a Blogger Award thing going on, a sort of a chain letter for the blogger world. I was nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award by Rebekah Burgess. I’m grateful for her to mention me in her blog and I want to pay the good forward and mention some people here in my blog. I hope you will take the time to see their wonderful sites. Instead of writing a list here I hope you’ll look at my blogroll in the right margin and you’ll find my links there. I’ve updated the list today. I’ve been looking into a good time to mention some of my online friends in this blog and via this chain letter the opportunity presented itself and it felt like the right thing to do right now. I know I’m not doing this completely by the rules, but I don’t think it matters much. Some of these people I have known some years now and I consider them my friends. Some of them are new acquaintances whose sites I intend to follow in the future. When I started posting pictures on Flickr I soon found the work of Iain Sarjeant and he has been a great inspiration to me and with his support I got my first followers on Twitter. The people who I mention in my blogroll have helped me to grow as an artist and with the help of their feedback I have learned to look at my work objectively. I have learned that I grow from positive feedback and I think many people do. When I see that no one retweets, faves or plusses a photo I’ve posted, I will remove it and the ones that get stars and plusses will stay. In that respect social media has been a great learning platform for me in my journey to become a better photographer. The same applies to writing as well I suppose. If you’re looking into getting inspired, those links in the margin do that for me every day. I follow a lot of artists, painters and writers, I find that helps me in developing my visual eye and helps me to open up the creative outlet in me. There is a fantastic supportive art group on Twitter that have so kindly adopted me even though I don’t post any drawings or paintings. Those of you who are on Twitter and into art should follow the hashtag #FollowArt to meet them.

As a photographer I get a lot of inquiries about locations. If you are interested in seeing where I’ve taken the pictures I post, I usually add the location on my Flickr map every time I think it is relevant information. If you scroll the photos you will get more pink spots on the map, you can only see the location of the photos that are just in that specific place in the stream that’s shown on the map. I think it’s a great tool for looking at Flickr photos and seeing their location at the same time. I had a bit of trouble adding some locations there today since my Flickr is still on Indonesian. I’ve been too lazy to contact them about it and I feel that I’m learning quite a lot of Indonesian on the side: ‘Pilih foto dan video’. Today as I was going through the comments that I’ve got for my most recent posts I came across a post about the Mediterranean sea and how polluted it is. It reminded me of the feelings I had when I saw the trash dumped by a cruise whip floating in the shores of Croatia on a visit to Dubrovnik a few years back. Needles to say I was heartbroken for a long time and stunned by the reactions I got from the locals. Most of them pretended it hadn’t happened but when I confronted one of them about it, I got an unfair: ‘maybe it’s the ship that brought you here’ comment. That made me realize that people’s jobs are on the line if tourists stop coming and to sacrifice your own environment for that starts to eat you from the inside. The situation in the Mediterranean and the geographical reasons behind it are very similar to our beloved Baltic Sea. I wrote a post about that some time ago when I saw an article on the newspaper saying our sea is the most radioactive sea in the whole world, even after everything that happened in Fukushima. Fighting for a cleaner environment is such an important job and I have immense respect for people who care. At least for me nature is by far the most important source of inspiration and I cannot imagine happiness without it.

I was finally able to finish reading all your wonderful comments today and found many new inspiring sites to follow. It seems that there is a wonderful supportive community also on WordPress. And, in the end, maybe any place is what you make it.