Kodak is working with YouTube on a great destination for moms - For Mom: Your Online Survival Guide.  The For Mom site features lots of great videos with tips, advice and inspiration for moms, from moms. You can find videos under topics like "In The Home" and "Health and Beauty".



We also added a few videos with advice for moms... from kids. You have to take their words of wisdom with a grain of salt, but they are very funny and very cute.

With this blog post I am starting a new series about German traditions and traditional festivals that bring together friends and family. These are very popular photo opportunities and the snapshots are happy memories for years to come.

When I checked my facebook account during the last few weeks, it was very obvious what was happening in Munich: Lots and lots of new photo albums - people evidently wanted to mark a special occasion and share it with the world.

People were tagged in photos as Bavarian lookalikes with big beer steins - the "Mass" - in their hands, wearing traditional Bavarian clothes, a "Dirndl" or a "Lederhosen". It was, of course, "Oktoberfest" time again, or "Wiesn" as the locals call it.


Photo by: Hendrik Nicolaus

The world's largest "Volksfest" attracts some six million people every year and is an event where friends and family from all over Germany as well as tourists from all over the world come together to celebrate one of the biggest parties in the world. For about 16 days, every hotel room, hostel bed and couch is booked in Munich. This festival even changes the look of the city itself. Everywhere you go there are people in traditional clothes - girls in Dirndl and guys in Lederhosen. It has even become fashionable for tourists to wear the traditional Bavarian clothes. Of course this look has to be documented by many many photos and shared with friends and family afterwards.


Photo by: Michael Lingelbach



Every year, new superlatives await: 5.7 million people came to Wiesn09, drinking 6.5 million litres of beer and taking millions of photos of course. Google Image search for Oktoberfest 2009 shows 2.670.000 photos, there are 15.838 Oktoberfest 2009 photos on Flickr and the Oktoberfest Facebook Fanpage has more than 23,000 fans. Some photos are really artistic, showing the rides and the enormous size of the "biggest beer festival in the world", but on most of them you can see people enjoying the party, smiling and having fun together - Oktoberfest time is definitely a time to smile. As part of the series "The big picture - News stories in Photographs" the Boston Globe showcases outstanding Oktoberfest photos.

However, Oktoberfest originally was not about pretzel and beer. The very first "Oktoberfest" occurred almost 200 years ago. For the commemoration of their marriage on October 12, 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig (later Kind Ludwig I) organized a big horse race on October 17th for Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen (namesake of the Theresienwiese festival grounds). Today, the Munich Oktoberfest starts on the third weekend in September and continues until the first Sunday in October - in these days always incorporating October 3rd, the German Unity Day. If you are interested in the full Oktoberfest history, you can find all details on the Oktoberfest - Wikipedia entry.

If you are a very keen Oktoberfest visitor you can already tick off the days until the 177th Munich Oktoberfest in 2010 - the Oktoberfest homepage shows the countdown.


Photo by: Hendrik Nicolaus

Kodak Germany created a Wiesn09 Photo group so if you have been at Oktoberfest 2009 don't hesitate to upload your best shots to the group. You have the chance to win a Kodak Z950 Digital Camera (Entry deadline is the end of October). Best of luck!

Every trip has its Kodak Moment - that instant in time that embodies the essence of the trip. Kodak Moments can exist as fond memories, but if you're lucky, you may capture some of your Kodak Moments in pictures. I had the good fortune to capture my Kodak Moment with my camera last spring.

It happened in a village whose name I can't pronounce in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. During that trip, my family and several members of our church youth group visited the indigenous Chinanteco people to distribute school supplies and clothing in their villages.

The high point of the trip was staying in one of those villages. Accessible only by steep, switchbacked dirt roads, Chinanteco villages don't get many foreign guests. Thus our group was a curiosity to the children from the moment we arrived.



The villagers were extremely hospitable and immediately began emptying one of their homes to make room for our group and cooking meals to share with us.



Even though we didn't know the Chinanteco language, and not all the villagers knew Spanish, we communicated with smiles and gestures. We ate with the villagers, played with the children, and worshipped in their church.



But my sweetest memory is a walk that we took around the village.

It started with this young boy. He began to follow me as I took pictures. When I photographed him then showed him his image on the camera's LCD, he was hooked.



Soon his friends joined him.



They all wanted to see their pictures on the back of the camera.



As we passed other children in their yards, they came to see what all the excitement was about.



I'd point to a spot where I wanted the group to stand, then back away and yell, "Uno! Dos! Tres!!" At the count of three, I'd take the picture, and the kids would race towards me, vying to see the image on the LCD.



I felt like the Pied Piper. More and more children joined our walk.



Apparently I mispronounced the numbers, so as we strolled through the village, the group belted out numbers in Spanish, teaching me the correct pronunciation. I repeated after them.

"UNO!!!" they shouted.

"Uno!" I said.

"DOS!!!"

"Dos!"

"TRES!!!!!!!!"

"Tres!" (which sounds like treys).



I had so much fun marching through the village with these children that I asked my daughter to take my picture with them.



This picture always triggers the warm glow of sweet memories, and I can't help but smile inside.

It was my Kodak Moment.