If you like to send e-cards and you appreciate fine photography, check out care2.com's latest e-card selections by our friend, renaissance man Eolake Stobblehouse, who is variously a professional painter and photographer, Mac evangelist, webmaster and essayist at the MacCreator Website, and who also runs an online fine art instruction course on his WhatMeArtist.com Website. Eolake, who is Danish, but who recently relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, has even found time to occasionally contribute articles to Applelinks.

Eolake's free pan-media WhatMeArtist course includes topics such as:
- How do I get ideas?
- What is a composition.
- How to increase production.
- How do I gain confidence as an artist?

Eolake says that whatmeartist is a philosophical course for artists of all mediums. The course is designed to work for painters, musicians, writers, sculptors, filmmakers... anybody working creatively, professionally or not.

"The modern world holds tremendous promise for the artist," says Eolake. "The ways to create and to distribute paintings, photography, writing, music, film, etc etc, have never been more manifold or more effective. Also the teaching of the technical side is getting better and better. Computers and electronic communication makes time and distance far smaller problems than they once were.

"The only problem is that with all this wonderful technology so easily available, the creative side is easily forgotten. Aesthetics becomes a matter of who can yell the loudest and fastest. Creation becomes a problem of mechanics.

"And of course it isn't. It never has been, and never will be. Creation and beauty comes from the heart and from the spirit. While technology and technique can be wonderful aids, they will stay mere tools, and will never replace the creator. You, the artist.

"Which is why we somehow worked up the nerve and stepped into this gaping void, teaching a course for the heart of the artist. It is with trembling hands and great humility that we attempt to share what we have learned about the act of creation through several decades of fumbling research.

"Still, this is an important mission. The world needs good creators more than it needs peace or food. If we can do ours to help this along, we will feel justified in our existence on this fine world."

In his latest MacCreator article, The New Flame, which was also published by Britain's biggest photographic magazine, Amateur Photographer, Eolake chronicles how he got his start in photography as a teenager, then drifted away from the medium, only to have the flame recently rekindled by the purchase of a Nikon Coolpix 950 megapixel digital camera to compliment his Apple Lombard PowerBook.

"No darkroom!" he writes. " I hadn't had one since school, I had used odd and unsatisfactory temporary solutions, and it just did not do it for me. I just do not feel creative without a great deal of control over my images.

"Digital imaging at a decent price has just now poked its charming head into a range of image quality I feel comfortable working seriously in." Being a lapsed professional photographer myself, I know where Eolake's coming from. I haven't had a darkroom of my own since 1976, and film photography just does not have the same appeal without that level of control over your work.

Like me, Eolake admits to still "slavering" over "medium format Mamiyas, Fujis, of Contax rangefinders, and professional SLR systems, not to mention the quality of large-format systems. But I just can't be having with the hassle of films and chemicals. I can take a picture, and anywhere I am in town or the world, I can put it immediately into the laptop and put it on my web site or mail it to my friends. And in a quality people hardly believe when they see it."

Indeed. You can check out some of Eolake's digital images on the Care-2 e-card Website, and even send them to your friends for free. The one entitled "Simple Wave" does it for me.

Charles W. Moore

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October 14, 2008