A Flickr of Light.

Sometimes, I enjoy art. However I am ashamed to admit (coming from an arty heritage) that a lot of 'important' art just doens't speak to me. I can look at it, appreciate the talent that would have been required to create it or maybe, in the case of most modern art, appreciate the fact that it's revolutionary. But it just doesn't excite me, or seem beautiful to me.

Strangely this apathy doesn't extend to photography. The recent bout of photo displaying websites has been heaven for me and when I was introduced to the website flickr a few months ago I became a little bit obsessed. I can spend forever admiring the different styles and obvious talent. How fantastic are the creative and adorable photos of this photographer's kids?

The weird thing is that I am also really interested in the minutae of the techniques and methods used to create stunning photography. I found this lesson on the rules of photography fascinating, despite being terrible at both maths and photography. And I love the tilt shift effect of the below photo, althugh I'm still not sure what the difference between a fake tilt shift and a real one is.

Websites such as phiary and blogs which post interesting photography such as Peachy Hollow (I love the idea of a self-portrait a day... a little voyeuristic perhaps?) are also responsible for my love for photography. Although my photography skills are still absolutely terrible, I think that sites like flickr have been responsible for me falling in love with photography, so much that I've started to look at the pretty pictures in magazines, not just the words, and finding them beautiful.

NB: in celebration of this, I added a new tag: Art Attack, for posts which are solely about the traditional sense of art, but of course one could go on on to argue that films, fashion even food and anything beautiful is in fact art. Therefore my whole blog would an art blog, so I deleted the tag and replaced it with Pretty Pictures. Naturally, not all pretty pictures will be filed under Pretty Pictures, so if you're looking for a post about arty stuff, it's probably under 'my cultural education'. Thanks.