Photography is about many things. People view the world differently. There are stereotypes in photography - there are the "postcard" photos, the snapshot, the selfie and so on. I do not care much for that. For me, photography is about recording something that made an emotional impact on me.

It can be as complex as my daughter's face when she was about to destroy a small flower in my garden at the tender age of 4, or as simple as chaotic patterns. To see what I mean, I photographed a tree. Just a tree with no leaves. Not even a special tree. But the image I saw when I looked at it, is what you (hopefully) can see for yourself now thanks to the profession of "painting with light".

Just saw this new echo look from Amazon. Sounds cool? I think not. By buying and using this you are inviting cybercriminals and black hat hackers in to your most private moments and potentially share it with the world. Remember, once a photo is on the internet it never goes away. You sure you want to do this?

Remember my main rule to protect your digital self:

Be informed, use your brain and think before you do.

Just listened to a client speaking about a new project which they would like to have developed, and during a scoping meeting this was said - really priceless:

We haven’t worked this out now. Having said that, it does not need to stop the development. The development just has to be open so we can choose to go one way or the other.

This was said of a requirement which is akin to me saying I want to buy a car or a plane, I am not sure yet, but it does not have to stop the manufacturing of it.

I have a small parsley plant in my house. Whenever I rotate the pot by 180°, the leaves moves to face the sun coming from the window next to it. The leaves move surprisingly quickly. Below you can see 6 hours and 23 minutes compressed to 10 seconds.

Capturing this was made much easier by the built in intervalometer in the Canon 5DsR.

The internet is a very large place. Some estimates place it at 1 exabyte (1 billion billion bytes). Or almost 5 billion web pages. Take note that these are horrible simplifications as the internet is comprised of much more than just the World Wide Web. Regardless, every person who has ever interacted with anyone will probably have some kind of digital footprint. Do you have a driver's license? Passport? Health care card? Have you ever visited a doctor? Even though you may not have given any consent, interacting with the world will create digital traces of you all over the internet.

Unfortunately the internet is a little bit like entropy - it always only increase. The internet gets more complicated, bigger and with that, your privacy becomes more and more at risk. Every day we connect more devices to the internet than ever before. Think of the prefix "smart" that has become so commonplace. Smart phones. Smart baby monitors. Smart video cameras. Smart TV's. The list goes on. Most modern Blu-Ray players, TV's and amplifiers can connect via WiFi or ethernet to the internet. Your baby monitor can probably do that too - so too your security cameras, smart light bulbs, smart smoke detectors, smart air conditioning, smart car...

Being connected is cool - it makes many things much simpler and better. But there is a dark side to all these advancements. Unfortunately technology outpaces our ability to reason properly. We build smart cars that can download firmware updates over the air and update your status with Facebook, without stopping to think what the downsides of doing that might be. It is trivial for people to hack your smart car and take over control of the automated components such as braking, sometimes steering etc. This is a terrible risk. Many of these smart cars have no security whatsoever. I recently reviewed a smart surveillance camera that does not even support secure HTTPS connections - it only had HTTP. This for a security product!