My Gurushots Tips, Part 3 (the Events)

Gurushots has invented a new smart way to involve people : they create Events twice a week, like contests of contests in small groups, involving 100 photographers of the same level at a time.

After a bunch of them where I finished 1st 2nd or 3rd, here’s what I found :

1. When an Event stops, stop (or slow down) posting pictures in the new challenges, keep them to get fast points at the beginning of the next new Event.
2. The challenges you have already begun will bring you fills and boosts, which will be added to the ones you got from the previous event. Keep all of them as little tools.
3. But prepare them though. Watch the challenges, watch what people post, and get your pictures ready in your profile basket.
4. Don’t use the daily free boosts for now, resist.

When a new event begins :

1. First, review all 4 pictures challenges you have and use the free Boosts on the most successful pictures… or the one you love the most!
2. Don’t forget to check and use the new free Boosts every day.
3. Then watch the next challenges which will enterfinish soon. You will need here all the boosts you have (to unlock them). Post your work.
4. For each of the “4 photos” challenge, I suggest you post only ONE of the four pictures. This way, you take your place in the challenge, and you won’t have to use Swaps to gain votes later (because, as you know already, the boiling appears in the last one or two hours of a challenge). When the end approaches, post the 3 others to fill it.
5. Then watch the challenges you entered before which will finish soon. If it’s in one or two hours, activate your tools : Swap if you have low votes, Boost if you have some left, Fill. Watch what happens; maybe you’ll get a hit!
6. If you have some Fills left, review all you current challenges and fill some the most successful ones (which means that your picture is appreciated) – but keep some Fills for later.
7. Enter all the challenges left you can. Be creative if you don’t fill exactly the challenge rules : use toys to invent fairy tales, use nature if you don’t have National Park pictures, etc.
8. By doing this, you’re much more active than before, it’s why their Events was a good idea. It can happen that you get a great rank, or Guru picks, or win a challenge, who knows?
9. Near the end of the Event, you’ll be empty of Boost, Fills and Swap. You can let go, or you can vote to push the soon closing challenges. It takes time.
10. Please vote really, not in clicking the validation button like a fool – which would encourage the bad works.
11. If a picture is really successful, Fill it, then every 10 minutes pile around 20 votes on the it to keep your dial at the maximum all along.

Remember : the boiling happens always at the end of a challenge, within the last hour : focus on these – everybody is active (and voting), it’s useful.

Have fun!

Photography : French Park – October Signs…

Dragonfly is tired and flowers are a bit cold, stains appear on leaves, things die or fall into water – summer momentum slows down, and will drown soon. I took these in Le Parc des Géant in Lille, North of France :

 

 

 

“My little wallet of enthusiams” : How to fight Anhedonia?

Jim Harrison says somewhere that with the years our “wallet of enthusiasms” becomes thinner.

Well, this speaks to everyone, right? From a truckload to a wheelbarrow (“une brouette”), then to a small briefcase, to a wallet, that’s it. At 50 you don’t jump around screaming in joy about whatever new comes to you, like at 20!

“The moment when things you do become absurd” is probably something I should wonder about more. A kind of “inverse epiphany”, the sudden WTF moment…

• Sudden Absurdity Syndrome

There’s this moment when you watch in an awe the others keeping being happy and goat-jumping at anything new. Are you becoming just grey?

• Big Boredom

So I just learned about Anhedonia, reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure, and I think it’s about it.

There’s the good old temptation of getting “stoned”, or to being “entertained” until death, Netflix like, or trying weed or booze, or worse : become workaholically busy like a running headless chicken. Put a lit on enlarging boredom…

You can also FOCUS on your little wallet. Think about it : what makes you enthusiastic, the “like a kid” state? Art exploration? Creativity? Writing (about what?)?

• Gleaning in loop : the “Gathering Seashells” Type

Could one find a new thin paper, in their wallet? One activity you never tried?

Of course I feel this! Therefore what?

What puts me in the “happy child” state? I thought about it and found two things :

1. Taking pictures, walking outside the-nose-in-the-wind.
2. Exploring geniuses (I’m with Fellini and Schubert these days).

• La Dérive is the French “drift”

Someone told me recently (he’s a bit older than me) that he for now focuses on geniuses only. What would be YOUR list of geniuses?

Proust, Welles, Picasso?

These days I’m with two geniuses. Fellini for cinema, and Schubert for music. Both need organization and efforts.

1. Fellini comes from realism to crazy surreal monster films. It’s complex, evolving, multi-layered, a whole exploration is needed to understand : films, bonuses, interviews, biography and many books. At THIS level on invention, it becomes almost toxic. It haunts you (like when you explore Proust, Mahler’s music or Manet’s paintings). And it’s so much fun too!
2. Schubert is complicated : he died young, but composed many many musics, chamber music, piano and 9 symphonies! As usual, for a composer you don’t know, you have to listen to many things almost randomly – to discover if you’ll like it, to sponge it into your head. I bought books, a huge biography, and found my entry : the Great Symphony, his last, which obsesses me so much that I listen to different versions all day long. They I read pages of classical music fan forum (in French : http://classik.forumactif.com), smiling at all the passion people put into this…

Anhedonia’s here, but I fight, and it works! If you see me mimicking an orchestra director in front of my Macintosh : I’m good.

What’s next? What about you ?

A field you don’t know, and you’ll explore it. What is it? A language? A painter? A country? An author? Who?

Thanks for reading!

“Cat & Chimneys” Photography : October Lights in a French City

I went to the the post office I walked with my little cam and the light was cool – I took the courtyard and the walls and the houses and redhead cat who’s a little the king of the street, it’s October!

I have a photographic place here : https://qeht.photo.blog/

 

“What’s the point?” : Anhedonia, a reduced wanting

I needed to be in my fifties to hear about this concept of “anhedonia“, a diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure. (Wikipedia).

Inability to experience pleasure, but also reduced

1. motivation
2. anticipatory pleasure
3. consummatory pleasure

Well : the wanting and the liking are reduced. A big lost of interest!

This preliminary itself is interesting : it’s NOT depression. It’s just what we call in French “à quoi bon ?” : what’s the point, what’s the use, what good would it…, etc…

Association with boredom, a will to stay in bed, a will to sleep all the time! You can feel this even without being sad!

If one makes, in a good movement, an effort – like me with this article – one will stop very soon, because… what’s the point, right?

It’s sometimes a bit surprising, because in the past you LOVED to do it, right?

Then there’s probobly a seek for… oblivion. Video games? Stupid sports? Alcohol?

It can be helpful, after all, and more if you feel guilty! (because in our societies, one has to be busy, right?).

Anything vain will maybe help, like driving your car in the night, anywhere, for hours, with music.

And there are the old tricks : call a friend, get drunk, pick up a randombook, listen to some music, trance (go dancing?), shopping. It can work!

But most of the time, you don’t care about all this anymore… either!

Of course here I don’t talk about “major depressive disorders”, where you stay in bed crying or in catatonia for months.

No, it’s just the “not in the mood now”, a social detachment, random indifference…

We’ve all been there, right? Our mind like a Steve Reich music…

I am also convinced it can be linked to a loss. When you’ve been at war, for example, you’re into a “mode”, and then when you’re home you’re just… not bored, but not valued, not understood, alone, and you don’t understand what people do anymore. And lifting weighs seems suddenly… what’s the point?

What happens after a break up?

Wiki says : “There is no validated treatment for social anhedonia.”. Voilà !

I just found another word to explore : “Avolition”.

How do you deal with that? What if it becomes a constant mode? How to get out?

For me :

• I do a little step anywhere. It can trigger…
• A good book. There’s no better trick.

Thanks for reading!

Freud, Jung, Symbolism and Fellini

I read some Freud and Jung a lonnng time ago, and I kept ideas from both brains, how sex energy climbs into action, politics, arts – or whatever – from one, and synchronicity from the other, for example

These days I read a lot about Fellini’s movies, and in an interview I read what he said about symbolism in Freud and Jung – so I imagined I could offer it to you now; here it is :

1. For Jung, symbolism is a way, a medium likely to express an intuition for which one can not find a better expression. Therefore, for Jung, the symbol is a way to express the inexpressible, even though ambiguously.
2. For Freud, a symbol is used to replace something which is likely to change, which is therefore impossible to express, and which one has, consequently, to forget. The symbol is a way to hide what is forbidden to tell.

 

Hmmm?What do you think, and where to apply this distinction? In a poem? A painting? A story? What are the archetypes, here? Is it a matter of choice? What about the “symbols effectiveness”? To whom?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Photography : Taking the veil… off?

I know that most of photography amateurs today modify their pictures on the computer. You have powerful tool to change paramaters…

I took the first picture one summer day on a flea market. To make the second picture I :

• increased sharpness (30%)
• Increased contrast
• decreased brighness

 

The two last steps “took the veil off”. It’s really like a veil. When you remove it from your pictures it’s like you cleaned the glass window between the world and your eyes.

I chose another picture with a tree. If I remove the veil, the tree’s shadow is more… correct, but I think, I feel I lost the summer mood… Maybe not. I don’t know.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Joseba Eskubi, Spanish painter

Joseba Eskubi is a Spanish artist, who creates “soft, amorphic and organic forms”.

You’ll find the “Bacon thing” in his work, or find it a bit weird, but you’ll feel your brain searching, turning around with the idea of “what-is-it” boiling. His colors skills are great.

It stopped me. What do YOU think?

2019

 

Tyutchev, Russia, Reason & Faith

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873) was a Russian poet.

I need him here for a poem which says that you can not understand Russia with reason : you can only believe in Russia.

It’s a structure for the mind, a way to deal with reality.

 

Here are a few attempts to translate the quatrain :

Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness:
She stands alone, unique –
In Russia, one can only believe.

You can’t understand Russia with your brain,
You can’t measure it with the standard instruments:
She has a particular status –
In Russia you can only believe.

Russia is understood not by the mind,
Nor by a common rule.
She has a special stature of her own:
In Russia one can only believe.

Russia cannot be understood by the intellect,
nor can it be measured by the common measure;
it has its own particular form,
you can only have faith in Russia

Don’t try to get it with your mind,
Don’t try to fit in your dimension:
There is no Russia of your kind –
Here your belief is only mention.

Russia is a thing of which
the intellect cannot conceive.
Hers is no common yardstick.
You measure her uniquely:
in Russia you believe!

 

Where do we use this structure? In love maybe. In some decisions, or changes (“Do I want to have kids with this person?”). When something’s too big for your own experience.

It’s a bit oriental, right? Let go reason : embrace…

 

Thanks for reading!

Joseba Eskubi

 

 

 

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