Eric's Beijing Diary

Can you believe I won a contest? That sure doesn't happen very often. Lessee...the last time I won a contest is when I first went to work for UAT. I was in the IT department half time, and teaching the other half. They had this contest in the IT department where you would get a point every time you said someone's name. At the end of the week, the one with the least points was the winner. That was me. I won the contest by not saying anything to anybody. The prize was a $75 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. Well, you know, when you give a gift card for a bookstore to a bookaholic, it isn't going to last long. Still, it was nice.

This time, it was a photo contest. Don't get excited, though, it was just "honorable mention." That's alright. I like being honorable, and I don't mind being mentioned. The Beijing Municipal Education Communication put together an album of pictures taken by foreign experts living in Beijing. I sent them four or five jpegs, and they chose two of them for the book.

The picture on the right surprised me a bit. I took that shot of the Ming Dynasty guard tower at the Forbidden City with my old 2 megapixel Minolta. Two megapixels is more than enough for putting pictures on a website (1024 * 768 = 786,432), but prints are a whole different story. For prints you really need mexapixels. I almost didn't submit it, because I didn't think they would be able to use it. But it actually blew up pretty nice.

Realistically, you can't expect to win first prize with a pocket camera even if you are a pretty good photographer, which I am not. But the age of digital cameras has definitely changed things. Pictures are free. There is no cost for taking them, or for developing them, unless you want prints. But you can view pictures and show pictures without printing them. Because of this, you can take as many pictures as you want to make sure you get a good one. Sometimes this creates a problem, because you have to discipline yourself to throw away the shots you know you will never use. Last summer I took 300 pictures to get a hundred for my website. But the upside is that if you click the shutter enough times, even a very amateur photographer can accidentally come up with something good once in awhile. And there isn't much chance that someone like me would ever go in for one of those fancy cameras. I wouldn't use it. Not very often, anyway. I would be thinking of excuses not to bring it with me. Take these two pictures, for example. The one on the right I would have, because I was on a self-guided bicycle tour that day. That's the kind of situation where you tend to bring a camera. But I would not have the picture of the juggler, because I would not have had my camera with me. I was busy and the sky was cloudy--not a day for taking pictures. But for me, pictures are about life, not just about scenery. I take pictures to enhance descriptions of life. I really need to have a camera so small that I can take it with me all the time.