Abe Comments

Last warm days and last chance to feast eyes on the impressive beauty of autumn painting her magnificent views with fallen leaves, trees and sun. Battle between summer and winter is going to take just a couple of days more and finally winter depression will attack. Short days. Dark afternoons and “special” clothes which make you move like a big, fat creature, who is always looking only for a place to sleep. I usually do not wake up with the sun, as some say. I guess on Sundays I will have a great opportunity to wake up at a sunset or not to see a single sunbeam at all. Each year I try to find a sollution, a way of defeating this horrible sickness brought by winter. This year I’ll do enything to take a few days off and go somewhere with friends. I haven’t had winter holiday for years!

Fog came to the city yesterday night. It was so dense that I could not see a lamppost standing 20 metres before me. I thought the conditions might be interesting for taking some shots. I took a camera and went to nearest construction site. Some people were still working there casting long shadows. Everything looks so unreal in fog. Even normal things, shapes we see everyday look different, fantastic or mysterious. Before I managed to install the tripod workers disappeared and I had to focus on the landscape with no people. Fortunately there was this digger that looked like a big frozen dragon or a hand of some kind of a giant getting out of his cave. I took a few shots in the artificial, yellow lighting of street lampposts. Fog is magical!!

I have just moved into a different district and now I spend most of my free time in traffic jams. That gives me an opportunity to think. It’s not that I don’t think in other situations. I can spend many lazy hours thinking about anything I’d like without having to leave the car. I feel safe, almost like home but with no presence of other house creatures - brothers, mothers, dogs etc. I guess that many drivers have not noticed this great opportunity which was given to them as a sophisticated gift of modern civilisation. Most of them spend time in traffic jams deeply exploring their nostrils, swearing at other drivers and talking on the phone. Why take the underground, train or tram while we can broaden our horizons stuck in long lines of comfortable, modern machines?! People do not leave your cars at home. Let’s spend our lifes in cars!

I hate smokers. Unfortunately many of my friends smoke and I cannot really do anything about it. Why do I hate them? I have in fact one reason, their egoism. Have you noticed that they do not care about nonsmokers? They always want or rather demand a place where they could smoke but at the same time they do not care if the smoke impacts life of other people. It is even more anoying when they find smoking in a public place normal. I’m not going to explain the details of smoke influence on health. That’s not what I’m about. I just hate the smell of cigarettes which follows me home from work. I’m fed up with the stinking lift in my block. I’ve got enough of people who smoke at my window and say that I overreact because I tell them not to do it . Moreover smokers tend not to believe that the smoke may be unpleasant. It is not that they do not care. They are simply unable to understand that one may not love and share their “passion”.

I cannot understand why PC edition of FotoStation Pro is so different from the one prepared for Mac OS. When I worked with Mac FotoStation I found it the best photography soft I’d ever seen, of course only as an addition to Adobe’s Photoshop. In fact there is no better and faster way of viewing, selecting and describing pics, especially when it comes to hundreds of photos. I cannot say I completely and thoroughly tested the PC version. Nevertheless I noticed at once that I was having problems with deleting images. Well, that was, in fact, the only thing I installed Fotostation Pro for, to easily view and quicly remove unwanted photos that is. Moreover PC Fotostation interface looks very hard but that may be the matter of getting used to it.

I would die if I had no books. I always try to have a book with me so I could read something in the meantime, you know on the bus or when I wait for somebody. I have just finished the “Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. It is not an easy piece of literature but indeed very interesting, colourful and creepy. The main idea is quite simple and common but at the same time it is just something that always makes me wonder. Do our deeds impact our outlook? Or maybe how much our deeds impact the look? The book certainly touches many different aspects of human existence. I am sure every reader will find something else in it, but for me that was the main idea. Beside psychological problems Wilde also described his view on English 19th century high society. It is a great piece of literature, worth a moment of reflection.