First of all, may my anonymous benefactor please stand up, so I can virtually hug him/her to death. [I mean it!]

Strangest thing, last night at about 4 AM, when I got home from a beer-session, I thought I taw that little star-thingy in front of my deviant name. Well, when I woke up, it was still there... meaning I just got my first DeviantART subscription!

Due to the holiday season, I am currently at home, where the computer is slow and the internet connection even slower, but as soon as I get back to Cluj-Napoca I promise to honour my gift and put it to good use!

Although I always wanted a subscription, I feel unworthy of it at the moment, but even though I've been pretty uninspired and apparently idle lately, I want you to know that your gift is highly appreciated and I hope you'll show your face so I can thank you properly.

On August 6, I was returning from my 3rd Eurotrip and this was also the day I was becoming a 2 year old photo enthusiast here on DeviantART. These are my gallery stats so far: [link]
This journal entry comes one year after the last Eurotrip-related one. I would have posted it a bit earlier, but I had 2500+ deviations and 500+ journal entries piled up in my inbox and I wanted to catch up with your progress first. Rest to sure, all was watched and read, eventually.

As some of you Watchers may have noticed, I've been completely idle for the last half year and I've been approximately idle and very shallow in appearance/posting since my last Eurotrip album. Well, I gotta tell you, it's been one hell of a year. Due to some feelings I didn't want to experience for the time being, I've created myself an emotional firewall, which obviously landed me to become an emotional cripple. Of course, not experiencing bad feelings has it's advantages, but my firewall got so effective that I stopped feeling good emotions as well. This also affected my photography a lot. I still took pictures, borrowed cameras, experimented settings... I haven't lost the itch for the trigger, but most of the images that I've taken had a simple concept that never went outside the box. My photography usually doesn't go outside the box, but this was worse. Besides the uncomfortable mood, I also lacked inspiring places because I haven't left town during this period. The town I was studying, that is.
I was going out a lot, drinking a lot, smoking a lot, getting home in the mornings and sleeping in the afternoons, always tired, always running for a refuge... always lonely. To spice things up, this was my last year in University, I had two licence papers to work on (double specialization), I had a lot of failed exams from my previous year and this year wasn't looking good either. Of course, the monsters were not only in my closet but also in my dormroom. This was the first year with complete strangers as roommates, and believe me, it was the most horrifying dormroom experience ever. Maybe the words "manelisti" & "cocalari" will ring many bells to some of you (sorry, no English equivalents, it's a Romanian social disease). Associate these with a 5.1 stereo sistem, a lot of mess, savage noises, vulgarity and violence and maybe you'll feel the need to go out for a drink and sleep elsewheres as well.
Believe it or not, through some divine miracle, I managed to succeed in taking 7 previously failed exams in one month (last one of school, to be precise), so now I had the right to sustain my license projects in front of the commission in order to get my diploma. Although I only actually started to work two weeks before the deadline and there were a lot of panic attacks and quitting attempts involved in the last 3 days of the countdown, I managed to finish both my projects (a cummulated 70 pages) just a few hours before my presentation.
After 32 sleepless hours and 4 not-so-long years, I graduated the "Technical-Economical Engineering" profile from the Faculty of Machine Building, all under the greater roof of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. Meaning I'm a freshly unemployed Economical Engineer (the reason I had to do both a Technical and an Economical paper for my license/diploma).
Two weeks later, I signed up for the masters degree, where I got admitted on a budget spot. So it's two more years in school, although I'll be working meanwhile. I'm hoping to get a good job, so I'll finally afford a better camera and the parts I broke on my bike a while ago. Not very ambitious, am I?
The master is called "Management & Engineering in Business".
In other news, since the 16th of July, I'm 23 years old and my ID picture is a bit out of date, because I have a short hair for 6 months now. Therefore, b e h o l d, the freshly emerged ID no.6: [link] You might also like to watch its remote, slightly dezolant sibling: [link]
Just for the record, I like the old one better: [link]


As for this year's Eurotrip, this was my third time out of the country and also on this trip, which had a different route every year. Let me introduce you a bit to its mechanism:
Taize [link] (official website), [link] (Wikipedia) is a community of approximately 100 brothers, in France, worldwide known, where approximately 5000 young people from all over the world (mostly Europe) come to take part in the community life every week. Most groups stay here for a week, but there are also volunteers that stay for the whole summer or even more. You might regard it as a camp. So the Church is the main organizer of this trip, although there's no religious criteria involved, you just have to sign up for it. We travel with a bus of 60 and the trip lasts for two weeks: one spent in Taize, the other one visiting Europe on the road to Taize and back. In 2007 & 2008, the cost for this was 210 Euros, and this year, because we went to London and Ferry expenses were added (crossing the English Channel), it cost 250 Euros. It's a fun cheap way to see Europe if you don't have other financial means. And take my word for it, that week in Taize is so wonderful that it will definitely make you dream of going there again the next year. If you have any friends that have been to Taize, just ask them about it.
Our group's route for this year was: Vienna - Strasbourg - Taize - Paris - London (2 nights) - Prague.


Back to photography, it filled my heart with frustration that I was travelling for the 3rd time through such unique places and I was still taking photos with a "soapbox" (it's what we Romanians call "compact cameras"). I almost borrowed a Fuji S6500 FD from a friend, the ideal companion for me because of its zoom range (28-300 mm), wide-angle lens and the best quality at high ISO levels that you'll ever find on a bridge camera. Unfortunately, he was also going to the mountains and was planning to use it, so I settled for a Canon PowerShot A720 IS which I borrowed from another friend, one that lent me half the money for my current digicam. As you already might know, I own a Canon PowerShot A560, which I probably complained about in all previous journal entries, because of its missing Manual mode. Well, the A720 IS has all manual and semi-manual modes, image stabilization and also a bit more generous 6x (35-210 mm) optical zoom which I found quite useful. The Canon was joined by a tripod, 6 SD memory cards of 1Gb each, 16 rechargeable batteries (the camera uses 2), 2 battery chargers and a 4Gb memory stick for eventual download. [link] A 4Gb SDHC card joined the group when I was fresh out of memory in London. The camera (8 megapixels) allows 280 full-quality exposures on a 1Gb memory card... which is not much. Anyway, I got back home with around 2200 pictures, although when I looked at the counter it showed over 3500 exposures, which means a lot of stuff was deleted directly on camera. I also brought back about 1,5 Gb of video material, all filmed with this same camera.
I'm still not out of the mental state I was describing in the first paragraph. It breaks my heart that I haven't managed to become at least a bit creative along so many famous and interesting places and objectives. Although some of the pictures may look clean and colourful, I'm very disappointed because all I managed to produce were standard postcards and not a single photograph. A wide-angle lens would have helped me produce spectacular results among the skyscrapers in Paris's La Defense for example, but there's no use blaming the camera because I know my problem is "upstairs". Another thing that limits me, besides my artistically-challenged brain, is my poor poor editing skills and my fear to get ambitious enough to conquer them and try to learn harder. I know how to work a camera, any camera, but when it comes to editing software I'm totally flushed. Knowing what can be done to an image and also knowing how to do it would definitely enable me to push my imagination on higher realms. Just to get an idea, my editing has never gone beyond: Crop - Rotate - Auto Levels - Brightness/Contrast - Shadow/Highlights - Selective Colour - Hue/Saturation - Photo Filter - Unsharp Mask - Framing.
Despite my artistic disappointment concerning this album, the Canon PowerShot A720 IS, through its Manual mode (which I was craving for a long time), actually enabled me to take better looking pictures from a technical point of view. One of my greatest joys was finally being able to work with the aperture, especially at night, where my Canon A560 would have automatically jumped to F2.6, its widest setting. Now I was able to work with more narrow apertures, like F5.6 or F7.1 at night (and especially F8 by day), increasing depth of field and also giving the street lights that star-effect, lights that on my A560 would have appeared like circular spread ugly spots. Except blowing up highlights and poor detail in the shadows, I'd recommend this camera as a great, fun compact for travelling and all around use.
This album consists of 90 images from the above mentioned places. A bit more selective than last year (140 images), but only because I had some of the places already covered in the gallery. This is a photojournalistic album, same as Eurotrip '08 and Eurotrip '07. The simple names and numbers of the images suggest that. Some of the pictures might not tickle your eye, but they're still simple and clean and their meaning is to expose some places that others might want to visit after seing what they look like or places they simply like to remember. Honestly, that is the main purpose of these albums: sharing the experience through my eyes and lens.

All these being said, I appreciate you getting this far with the reading and I invite you to enjoy the 3 Eurotrip albums I've gathered so far:

#3 - 2009: Vienna - Strasbourg - Taize - Paris - London - Prague [link]
#2 - 2008: Munchen - Zurich - Taize - Paris - Bruxelles - Amsterdam [link]
#1 - 2007: Vienna - Paris - Taize - Lyon - Cannes - Monte Carlo - Verona - Venice [link]

You might also like to check out my better works in the newly revised "Featured" pages here: [link]

PS: The "SitBack" function will prove very useful while doing this.

This morning when I returned home at about 5 AM I started the computer to check on my mail and Deviant account just to find out that some cock-sucking ego-inflated self-indulging-wanking-bastard (pardon my French) finally reported my "Eiffel Tower by Night" and it was deleted by the DeviantART staff:



NOTE #1
"Your deviation Eiffel Tower by Night was reported for Art theft (General). The report was reviewed by a member of the Staff and action was taken, deleting the deviation and marking the report as Resolved. Additionally, the following comment was provided:
Upon review a member of staff determined that this deviation included copyrighted content used without permission. Removed as a violation of deviantART copyright policy.

This message was generated automatically."

NOTE #2
"The administrator who deleted your deviation added the following:
Deleted in response to case #354329.
The work(s) listed below have been removed by staff as a violation of the deviantART copyright policy.
Your deviantART submissions must consist entirely of your own work or valid stock resources and must not include works from copyrighted sources.

Please read our Copyright Policy and if you have any questions or believe this removal to be an error please contact the deviantART Help Desk."



Not so long ago, =elgarbo had the same surprise [link] and a few days ago, =WildRainOfIceAndFire was stupidly reported for simply putting a Self-portrait in the Emotive Portraits category [link]
I enjoyed both their replies and I advice you to read them too.
Call me a sentimental fool, but I thought we were suppose to support art here, not sabotage it by every stupid means possible.

In case you haven't already found out, it is illegal to post pictures of the Eiffel Tower taken at night, because since the French put some new lights on it, they copyrighted it's image.
So what can I say, I can't blame DeviantART for this because they were only following procedures... and you can't be mad at the French for copyrighting the image of their landmark, can you? Of course you can!!
I think =elgarbo explained it much better in his journal:
"How is it possible that the image of something can be claimed by copyright? I mean, I can understand that a photo, or an artwork, or anything like that is a work of intellectual property. But how can an image of such a creation also be protected? Seems like madness to me, but then again, I haven't got a legally technical mind."

As for reporting it as Art Theft, I hope it doesn't refer to the fact that I didn't take the picture myself. But in case anyone was stupid enough to think that, I'd advise them to check my EXIF datas and they'll find out that 95% of my gallery was shot with the same camera. And they're not great images either, why would I steal them?

Here's the emotional background, so that you'd understand why I'm so upset about this:
"Eiffel Tower by Night" was my first uploaded image to DeviantART, it was fully non-edited and it was my most succesful image so far, with a big gap over the others in means of favorites and views: [link]
Here's the edited version of it that I uploaded an year later: [link] , I beg of you to report this as well.
So anyway, I'll have to wait for a while until my next popular image will go that far. It wasn't far compared to other shots arround here that got more favorites and views than my entire gallery (no, really!) but for a small timer like me that image meant a lot and it had a sentimental value. I took it 2 weeks after buying my first digital camera and it was also my first time ever out of the country. I would have never dreamt I'd be next to the Eiffel Tower and taking a picture of it, especially a pretty-looking one. It was my first time ever using a tripod, descovering long exposure and all the rest, that's why I was shocked when it turned out alright and I couldn't wait to get home (in Romania, after 2 weeks) and see how it looked on the computer. I slept with the memory card of the Paris shots under my pillow just to be sure I could get them home and download them into the computer and watch them.

Anyway, for all of you fans of this reporting activity which is growing into a sport, remember that we're here to support photography, art and artists. I can understand reporting shots of young people fucking or shitting in each other's mouths, but if you see a harmless colourful image, just try to enjoy it and let others get the chance to do that too. It might please you more on the inside as well.

PS: I just realised it was Friday the 13th. What were the odds?

I haven't written a "Thank you!" journal before, because so far I'm not famous enough not to be able to respond to all of my messages and favorites personally. And as you may have noticed, I don't write journals here in general.

It's been approximately 1 year and 6 months -1 and a half years- since I joined DeviantART and basically since I started to be interested in photography. It might not be news to some of you that I still use the same camera I started with, the Canon PowerShot A560, which's lack of Manual mode I complain about everyday. And I'm sure I'm not going to be able to upgrade anytime soon. Anyway, in case I would rob a small bank or crack an ATM, I would buy either a Sony DSC-H50 or a Canon SX10 IS. Yes, they're both bridge cameras. I'm very realistic about D-SLRs and let's admit it, if you can't afford to upgrade them after being bought, they're pretty useless and they limit you a lot (poor quality kit Lens, small Zoom, no Macro, no Video, etc.). Although even an entry level standard D-SLR gives you that DOF (Depth Of Field) and low noise at high ISO sensitivities that no bridge camera can provide.

Back to Earth, today I reached 13,000 Page Views.
I meant to "celebrate" at 10,000 but somehow I thought 13K would be more appealing, especially because "13" has some meaning to me. These are my gallery stats so far: [link]
I know it's not much, but considering the facts:
- I'm not very sociable around here
- I have no subscription
- I use a compact
- I don't shoot "artistic" nudes,
then I guess the results are satisfying.

I wish to honestly and warmly thank all of you who gave me any kind of feedback, to the ones who watched my photos and the ones who featured them. It made me very happy and anxious everytime. And nonetheless, I wish to thank my Yahoo! Messenger contacts who clicked and watched my Gallery when I featured the link in my status message. Every proof of attention meant a lot to me.

As for the Gallery, I changed the layout a bit.
I removed the Featured deviations because you can find all of them in the left folders/albums and I only kept some of the most important pictures (to me) to be Featured. The selection is still in progress. I had some images that didn't go in any of the albums that I already had, so I created a "Miscellaneous" folder and for the moment I placed them there. That doesn't mean they're bad or that they shouldn't get attention.
If you want to see all of the deviations in the descending order they were submitted (from last to first uploaded picture), just click Browse [link] and you'll see the Gallery just as it was before.

And if you got this far, thank you for taking the time to read my entry.

Until a few days ago, I used to find this tag game very stupid and annoying, especially because it kept popping in most of the Journal Entries I read and at first I only did read silly stuff. That, cumulated with the fact that everybody seemed so excited about this whole tagging thingye annoyed me terribly.
But these days, reading some very interesting thoughts and feelings revealed by some participants of this growing fashion made me realise it can be a nice, almost fun way to find out more about the Deviants surrounding you everyday.
So I decided to play along.

I was tagged by:

The Rules:

1. Post these rules.
2. Each person tagged must put 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Tagged ones should write a journal about these facts.
4. At the end of the post tag 8 more deviants.
5. Go to their page telling them they're tagged.
6. No tagging back.

My facts:

1. Although we're now financially estranged, Mountainbiking is my first true love.
2. I'm (called) a zodiac freak. [my sign -> Cancer]
3. When it comes to dancing, I have two left feet, that's why I develop infinite ways of avoiding to do it.
4. They say people aren't able to lie when they're drunk. Well... I am.
5. I don't have my future mapped out and I never did. Actually, I can't think more than 2 weeks ahead of myself.
6. I know what my flaws are but I'm having trouble fixing them.
7. I'm pretty empty on the inside, but I've learned that you can't be ok with someone else until you're ok with yourself.
8. I hug everybody.

And I tag:

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