Hello all,

I enjoy all your visits! Thank you so much for taking the time to visit and look at my pictures! I am very glad and honored! I do wish though that whenever you visit and decide to comment, you do so because you want to and not because you feel obligated to. Flickr is for fun!

Generally I try to reciprocate contacts and comments, given time. People that comment more on my pictures will naturally receive more attention... :) Might even be upgraded to "friend" status, so I can check on their pictures more often. The same goes the other way, if there is not a lot of contact, you might be taken off the friends list. You will still be a contact, tho. The friends list is dynamic, it will reflect our general contact level. Of course, it might be that you're in there just because you take such awesome pictures, too :)

I do prefer to have a smaller amount of active contacts and get to know them better. I don't necessarily have time even to visit their streams all the time either, but I know them a little better and hopefully they know me a little better, and I just enjoy to visit them more.

Oh, I've been very busy lately, and will be for quite sometime, so though I appreciate any and all group invites, I won't have much time to post shots to groups... I'm having trouble just keeping up with posts from my flickr friends... I have no general group posting strategy, just a "when time permits" strategy... :) This strategy pretty much boils down to no group posting, unless for some reason I particularly want to promote a shot, like for the Pink 2008 group (where Yahoo! For Good donates money for pictures that you post).

Another group I post to is Red for the People of Burma. Seeing Buddhist monks that, for me, are the very epitome of peace and harmony under attack was something that shook me to the very core of my being. This is the reason why I was one of the founders of this group. This is a group that wants to show that peace and democracy are very important all over the world, not just in Burma. However, since our roots started in September 2007, we keep the symbolic red and orange colors as a common thread to all pictures in the group.

If you have no pictures, no icon, no contacts... you will be blocked... If you add me and already have thousands of contacts, and don't even bother to leave a comment, most likely I will not add you back, and I will not bother looking at your pictures. Unfortunately I have to do this because time is too short, and I prefer to enjoy meaningful relationships with my flickr friends.

I bought my first SLR in July 2007 (Nikon D40). I used a compact before (Canon Powershot A80). Most pictures are taken with either of these. Most of my early shots are straight out of the camera, no crop or adjusting of any kind. A few have been cropped without me expressly saying so, but on all early shots that have been fiddled with beyond that I'll say so... I have tried Aperture, iPhoto and Picnik. Might at some point try Picasa, Gimp or Photoshop. Nowadays it happens that I slightly adjust colors, exposure and so on, using iPhoto. This is not the most advanced program around, so I don't do that much, just a little, which I feel more often than not gives the best results anyway.

All my shots, and I mean ALL my shots, are my copyright. If you want to use, blog, borrow, print or anything else, please contact me via flickrmail.

Have fun!

The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.

- By Ernst Haas -