Because the old cities and buildings of Holland appealed to me while on holidays there mid-last year, I have enjoyed looking through the black-and-white photos from this project, and thought it worthwhile mentioning Jan-Willem's Cities of Holland project.

The Project
Cities of Holland is a project of the Dutch photographer Jan-Willem Eshuis. The idea of Cities of Holland is to take a unique photo of all cities in the Netherlands that have (or had) city rights. City rights are a phenomenon in the history of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The rights where given by a liegelord (for example a duke) to a settlement he owned. The rights gave certain privileges that settlements without those rights didn't have. Some examples of city rights are the right to build a city wall, have a market or the right to charge toll.

In the Netherlands there is a total of about 194 cities with these city rights. The goal is to take a photo of each of these cities with a characteristic building or on a characteristic spot of that city.

one of the photos from the Cities of Holland project: Skyline of Deventer

photo by Jan-Willem Eshuis, used with permission

Why?
The idea of this project is based on the Streets of the World project. In this project the Dutch photographer Jeroen Swolfs is traveling around the world to make a photo of every capital in the world. His project is taking five years and inspired me to realize a similar project.

About Jan-Willem Eshuis
Jan-Willem Eshuis is a Dutch amateur photographer who's working as a CTO at a Dutch media company named NLbuzz. In his free time he loves to take photo's of all kind of objects. He used to take pictures with his Nikon SLR D50 and D60 camera but in december 2010 he bought his Leica D-Lux 5.

For more information on the Cities of Holland project, check out the Cities of Holland website, facebook page, flickr stream, or twitter page.




If you have never seen The Little People Project, it is definitely worth checking out. slinkachu is a UK-based artist who does street art installations, and photographs them. However, these art installations are tiny!
The recently-posted Dead Leaves series is a great example of the type of work in The Little People Project. The Fantastic Voyage is another of my favourites.

More photos from this series are available on The Little People Project website and on slinkachu's flickr stream.



Lisa Bettany has posted 6 New Year's Resolutions Every Photographer Should Make in 2012.
Every photographer should read her list and add those resolutions to your list!



Year-long exposure of Toronto skyline, taken with a pinhole camera, has produced an interesting photo. Michael Chrisman installed the camera at the beginning of 2011, and pulled it down on 31 December 2011. I particularly like the interesting trails left by the sun as it moves across the sky throughout the year.



In another year-long photography project, Eirik Solheim has taken a photo out of his window every half hour. He then used a selection of 3888 of those photos, and using a 1-pixel-wide strip of each, created a different kind of time-lapse photo. Have a look at his One Year in One Image blog post for the resulting photo.
If you are interested in the technical background on the process used to capture these photos, have a look at this blog post.