Well, i am starting here. First time is usually full of promises. So i wont get into.

At first my main interest was to find some kind of a guide on how to make good pictures, or better,
appreciated ones, but after a while i got it clear that there was not such a thing as a guide, instead there was a pretty confused path to a more relativistic vision: art is what somebody finds acceptable of being art. There are lots of somebodies.

A couple of days ago i had a brief exchange in the "color theory" mailing list about the history of setting the white and the black point as start in image correction. As usual Dan Margulis is an intriguing thinker. Digital color con be built up from the ground for cheap.

So i found that there is a quite interesting link between modern photography an ancient miniature making. First the sizes. Miniatures are at most the same size (and some time bigger) of the photos you can find on the web. There always had been, for obvious reasons, small photo makers,customers and lovers. But the web has a lot of somebodies and numbers sometimes rule, certainly in stating what is to be considered art. Miniature making, along with jewel making are the arts that conserved most of the practices coming from Roman, Greek and Egyptian culture for the benefit of middle age artists.

Getting back to the subject. A thing i consider important is the way in which those ancient thoughts have contributed to the formation of "canoni" that are present anywhere in image making. Consider for example the trees. Trees are most of the times thought as green even if they are so only for half time of the year (well not all), the same applies to skies (well once maybe they were thought as golden) always blue, except for "new topographers" who seems to find it white. Getting to landscape (or paesaggio as we say in Italy). Landscape if a conceptual artifact, mostly a mere verbal convention. History of the concept dates back its roots to three Italian areas: Florence, Venice and Milan. Milan could be the first since it is the historically first in massive land making/alteration for agricultural (pre capitalistic) purposes. A nice landscape was one well cultivated and well connected to the city.

Order is quite an important rule today. Almost every photo howto to has something to say about finding/imposing some kind of order on the subject.