1669 - Of Hope And Despair

This should be an image made yesterday, but yesterday I didn’t make any, and today is exactly the cold and rainy day that was predicted. Instead the image is from Saturday a week ago.

It’s pretty hard to capture the feeling of being in a Spring meadow, because on pictures this always looks less impressive. Thus you have to compensate by exaggeration. The LX5 is surprisingly good at that with its natural high DOF, the near minimum focus, the relatively wide lens and especially with the EVF, that can be tilted up to 90 degrees. Using the D300 with an ultra-wide lens, I would probably have come up with a very similar result.

And the title? Hope and despair? Well, it’s actually more about hopelessness. Let me explain:

Yesterday I saw the annual Eurovision Song Contest. For all of you outside Europe, this is an annual contest where singers from 40+ European countries (+Russia, Israel, Georgia, etc) sing their songs. Actually there is a pre-selection, and on the evening of the contest, 25 singers and groups get the chance to perform. This is followed by a voting, where all 40+ countries can vote, and then there is a winner in the end, this time it was Azerbaijan. Anyway.

The reason for my despair is, that after so many years of a European Union, after so much integration, the countries still don’t vote for music, they largely vote for their national sympathies. There is a nordic block with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, etc, and they vote for each other. There is a Yugoslav block and you see Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia/Herzegovina vote for each other (actually despite their differences, that even drove them to war, and that’s the hope part), you have a mediterranean block, and you have the block of what formerly was the Soviet Union. It’s not about music, it’s about nations. Crazy huh?

“Of Hope And Despair” is from “Wildlife”, the 2001 album by “The Crash”, a band from Turku, Finland. Hear it on YouTube.