Taking photos

 "Never forget that all the great photographs in history were made with more primitive camera equipment than you currently own." ~Brooks Jensen

From Kaisaniemi gardens

This is true of course, but it does not work like that. The demands nowadays are different. You look back at those great photos and admire them, the photographers did wonderful things with the equipment they had, they took them at a place that is famous for some reason or other, like the gold digging areas  in Canada, they are historic photos. 

Nowadays you have equipment that gets you close to any subject, catches a bird in flight, you can photograph the eye of an insect or snowflakes. A good camera takes extremely sharp photos. I came to a photographer on Flickr who had taken photos of the end of a glacier. To me they looked great, but a commentator complained they were not sharp enough!

I cannot afford a systems camera. I have a couple of small point and shoot cameras that really take scarp photos only outside in good light conditions, I have trouble taking close-ups or macros, sometimes it works, other times  it doesn't. 
No-one now accepts a photo as great if it is badly focussed or not sharp (unless intentional). 

Whatever reason, I have not been successful on Flickr, I have only a few photos with views 4000 to 6000 or over. There is a new trend at the moment of getting thousands, even over 140 000  contacts, nowadays called followers. In that case, 
if those contacts click on their photo or even see it, they get thousands of views.

I certainly will not try to do that  :-))

Kaisaniemi gardens

This is what it looked like on the 27th of  December 2014. There was still snow on new year's eve but by late  night it seemed  very wet and the snow was melting. I was not going anywhere to watch fireworks . Closer to the midnight when I wanted to take photos, fog was really thick, you could just see the closest trees.  I could hear fireworks, but they only showed as flashes of light in the fog, you could not see any individual fireworks. About 10 past 12 when no-one fired them any more, the fog started clearing but then it was too late, I wondered what it would have been like in Helsinki, I think they had no fog.

On the photo you can see some of the crowd last new year. When all that mass starts to press on you...

37 people were trampled to death in Shanghai at new year.  Somebody slipped at stairs with lots of people, there was a panic and so it happened. 47 were injured, 13 dangerously.

Tight crowds can become dangerous. One year ago I was in Helsinki where New Year is celebrated in a square in front of the cathedral. Because of the warm weather  the place was packed and when the ceremony was over, people turned to go to see more fireworks. Even on the edge of the square where I was, there were many rows of people in front of me. They could not go fast and the pressure from the rear, where most of them were was very strong. I felt that if someone happened to fall, it could have been dangerous and shouted to people to stop pushing.