Hi everybody – it’s great to see your photos, I want more of them!

For this week I read all about the rule of third in the photo composition guide – when I realised my cheesy camera actually has a cross in the middle and I have to imagine the thirds – still I kept that in mind. I read on and finally I did try the diagonal line (see underneath). I continued reading in wikimedia. Still I’m not convinced if my pictures will ever meet the high quality standards of wikimedia featured pictures – but I think it is still not to bad.

I was waiting for the weather to change but eventually I got myself persuaded that I should just grap my camera and take some photos. Right – this was actually more fun than I thought. I’m not really into taking photos – but today I did actually realize how much more you see when you try to find a motif:

I realized that there were two magnolias in the park

and there were bunnies all over!

So these photos were nothing I really cared about – I just took them. The scene is set in a small park about five minutes from my house. It’s actually one of the few spots in Mannheim which is quite pretty – Mannheim is a heavy industrial town otherwise. The main sight of my town I put on Wikimedia Commons (with a bit cropping etc.) – it’s one of 60 other photographs picturing the same tower - still I thought it might be a bit different with the art nouveau lantern. The tower was used for keeping a water reserve for the town until 2002 or so. More here

Before I put this photo there I had put two photos on Flickr and on their map – they show the building of the art gallery just opposite the art nouveau water tower. It has got a sculpture on top.

I didn’t upload them to Wikimedia as I had read about not uploading photos of sculptures to Wikimedia Commons – so I didn’t. I had checked before – and it seems to be okay for German law (‘freedom of panoram’) but as I wasn’t sure about it – it was explecitly stated that this is different in other countries I decided I shouldn’t use CC licences on them – not to harm anybody else. What do you think?

P.S. I like this sculpture a lot (the Artist is Hubertus von der Goltz)- and I was so happy when I got that bird there! So in the end I spent more time on this then I thought. Taking and editing the photos was okay – i do that quite regulary with the website at work. Playing with the flickr map was fun – and in all I really enjoyed this week’s assignment!

P.P.S Whenever I look for photos I use Flickr – I tried Google CC Search once but you can’t limit it to images, can you? Well in the future it’s definiteley Wikimedia, too.