Tagged: Photography RSS

  • Dave 12:10 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , Photography, photosharing, publicenergy, smugmug,   

    Flickr stagnation and withdrawal 

    flickr

    The screen shot above is what one of my photographs looks like on Flickr when viewed in a maximised browser on a 24” monitor. Five years ago, monitors were generally smaller and the Flickr pages looked quite nicely designed and the images seemed to be a reasonable size. As luck would have it, I found an old photo that contains Flickr running on a 17” monitor. This photo was taken in 2005 which was the year I started using the site. 5 years later, the photo pages are virtually unchanged.

    If I compare the Flickr screen shot at the top with what the same image looks like on SmugMug – again on a 24” browser, maximised, much more is made of the available space.

    smugmug

    Also, clicking on the main image, does a ‘lights-out’ enlargement to make it fill as much as the browser window as possible and fading out the background.

    smugmug2

    It’s not just the layout of the pages on Flickr that are well overdue for an overhaul – here’s a list of other irritations:

    • The speed of the site. It can be painfully slow sometimes, it sucks the joy out of browsing photos because of how long it takes to flick between pages and images.
    • The UK satellite maps are dreadful. When Flickr first introduced geotagging, the Yahoo maps they chose to use had really rough looking barely detailed maps in most of the areas I was interested in. Years later they are still like that – virtually unusable.
    • The attitude of Flickr towards their customers. It’s hard to know if this is all Yahoo these days or what – but there are countless tales of people having their accounts marked unsafe, or even deleted without any kind of discussion or right of appeal.
    • The popularity of the site has diluted the community aspect – This might be a bit of “this club was better before it was popular” type of thing – BUT – there is a lot to be said for smaller and well managed compared to catering for the millions. The help forums and a lot of the groups are depressing to read these days.
    • Unable to retrieve your complete data – It’s possible using third party tools to re-download your photos should you wish, but, it’s much harder to download your photos and also the information that was added after it was uploaded to Flickr. For instance, extra tags, possible extra geo-data, people in the photo and the comments. It really ought to be possible to download an offline archive of your photos with this extra data.

    So, for various reasons I have a few years left of paid Flickr account use. I’m gradually sorting through my photos that were uploaded to Flickr and putting them online at http://publicenergy.co.uk using SmugMug to make it work.

    My plan is to wind down what gets posted to Flickr and use publicenergy.co.uk as my main online photo storage site. notsowildlife.com will continue to serve as my animal photo specific site.

    I have no intention of actually deleting my Flickr account – although I’ll review that decision when my pro account expires in a few years time. For the time being I still need to keep tabs on friends uploading photos there, and it might be inconvenient for the small group of other Flickr users I really care about to keep tabs on my photos.

    For me, my favourite part of this whole photography hobby is actually going out and taking the photos – it is nice when other people see them and like them of course. The not so wild animal thing has had lots of nice feedback from people. Comments left on photos are one thing, but it’s the odd comment from people who have really reacted that I’ve enjoyed the most. People telling me that they’ve had to put one of my cow photos up in their new born daughter’s nursery for example. Somebody telling me their student produced a painting based on one of my cow photos. Being asked how close I get to ducks! or how I clean chewed up grass spat by llamas from my camera! These are enjoyable reactions I won’t forget.

    Flickr has been good socially too – I know quite a lot of good people as a result of Flickr meetups – I think that these events peaked a few years ago too – the love for Flickr is vanishing – so I’m glad I was around at the best time and still have a lot of friendships as a result.

    We’ll see how it all goes!

     

    • Nick 12:28 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      I feel your pain and recently wrote about issues I had with Flickr; finishing with a plea for them to either sell the service or shove some money at it and actually do something.

      Its a really hard call as the community aspects (when they work) are good, but the actual photo sharing is abismal at best. The service has barely changed since 2004 when it launched apart from adding features that help them make money. Such a basic site with little to no investment (and a small and unresponsive support team) must be a huge money cow for Yahoo. Which is sadly, probably why they can’t be bothered changing anything.

      Off to have a look at Smugmug now!

      • Dave Wild 12:38 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        SmugMug definitely doesn’t have a community to match Flickr by a very long way. It does however provide a fairly modern photo browsing web site that you can get working on your own domain name. It seemed the best option for me – less hassle than actually hosting and looking after something.

        • Nick 1:24 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink

          Perhaps a business opportunity to set up some competition for some photography minded IT geeks (or IT minded photography geeks)!?

    • Michael Randall 8:29 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Very nicely put, Dave. I’ve been somewhat unhappy with Flickr’s display for a while now, and stories of people’s accounts being deleted without warning or recourse make me nervous. The one thing that had always put me off SmugMug was that there didn’t seem to be a way to show your most recent photos – but your site has that.

      Knowing that was possible was enough to get me to try it out – I’m now trialling it, and may switch to it for most of my photos too.

      For the moment, at least, it’s at http://www.pigpog.co.uk – I may try linking it neatly in to PigPog next week.

      • Dave Wild 8:52 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Looking at the SmugMug blog, they seem to have a steady rate of improvements – especially recently. I think any extra features now will be a bonus – I’m enjoying the site’s speed and being able to see the photos larger by default. Good photos look much better larger – looking at a lot of my old ones though, making them larger means you can see how rough they are – the 500 pixel size on Flickr brushed a lot of problems under the carpet out of view! :)

        Have fun with it during your trial. I’m still finding things out and there seems to be lots of info about customizing the pages in their forums that I’ve not really looked at yet – I’m going to be concerned with sorting out all of the old images I want to move there that are currently very disorganised – I’m trying to avoid a “2000 random photos taken during the last 10 years” gallery!

    • Austen 4:27 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hey there Dave.
      Like yourself i have started trialling other sites, but as of yet havent settled on one. For me the reasons for looking around are different to some of yours, but i too realise that Flickr is past its sell by date, and soon to be passed its use by date. :-)

      I was never a big browser of others photos but yours were ones that always put a smile on my face and im sure they will continue to do just that.

      And it has been great meeting you a few times (because of Flickr) and of course lots of other people. Best of luck with your plans to sort your photos out properley. It sounds too much like real hard work for me. :-)

      • Dave Wild 4:43 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Well, I’m going to continue to keep tabs on Flickr and the contacts and friends there so I still see their photos, meet up and all of that kind of stuff.

        As for difficulty in moving, it was fairly easy – I found a Firefox add-on called Smugglr which copied all of my sets in to galleries on the new site – I do have a big pile of photos I never organised that I need to go through, but I can do that gradually – there’s no real rush! Deciding to do it was probably more difficult than actually doing it.

        • Milo42 5:58 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink

          Interesting post I had not given much consideration to flickr in that respect guess I’m always to busy to look in depth at it. You raise some good points. I have never seen smug mug so I will check it out in more depth when I can find time.
          The great news is that it has an RSS feed so I have hooked up the RSS feed of your pictures to my google reader and I’m sorted I will see the images you post.

        • Dave Wild 6:26 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink

          I think there are plenty of alternatives, but looking at the SmugMug blog, they seemed to have a bit of drive to make their product better and my limited experience of their forums and support looks good too.

          I already track the ‘friends’ Flickr RSS feed – which is basically Flickr contacts that I really care about rather than the hundreds I added years ago out of politeness! – I think I’m going to go through it and subscribe to the individuals though because I think things fall through the cracks and it’ll be good for me to get in to the habit of keeping track of photos where ever they are.

    • Milo42 9:27 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Yes I had come to realise I was missing new pics relying on the flickr email and have slowly been adding RSS feeds. RSS seems to be a better way to go. It will be interesting to see how you get on with SmugMug

    • John 11:33 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Good luck on your move away. I have started using Flickr and left numerous times. I have an account now but only to share photos with very specific people and participate in a group I started years ago. Otherwise Flickr does not appeal to me at all.

    • Primed Minister 12:37 am on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Dave,

      Sorry to hear you’re withdrawing from Flickr as I enjoy looking at your photostream, however I can relate. I agree that an overhaul is overdue. As websites go Flickr is quite a basic site now and at times it is slow, it could be a lot slicker all round really. A ‘light box’ feature for instance where the image ‘expands’ large above the web page would be a good one. How hard would that be to implement? Surely Yahoo have the time and resources? The geotagging, I agree with you, I gave up geotagging my images a while back as the maps simply aren’t detailed enough to pinpoint an exact location. Also grey seems to complement images better, it looks more neutral, yet we still view our images on Flickr against stark white by default.

      One of the things I enjoy about Flickr though, like everyone else, is reading people’s comments but what I regard as spamming, i.e . the addition of graphics and icons or replacement of words for meaningless icons is quite irritating. On some photostreams I don’t bother to leave a comment at all because of all the graphics and award icons you have to sift through to get to the actual ‘dialogue’. It’s a shame there hasn’t been some kind of filtering setup to automatically ban the graphics from appearing or a toggle on/off feature to make it optional.

      For all its flaws I’ll carry on using Flickr until I’m convinced of switching to a suitable alternative. SmugMug sounds interesting although I haven’t got the time to work on my own website. Credit to you for looking into other alternatives.

      Cheers, Paul.

    • premiump 12:34 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Yep, all good reasons Dave, and control of your own content is always something you have been really good at. As it goes, I let my Pro account lapse before Christmas, intentionally removing over 500 photo’s to keep it within the free “viewable” limit.

      I can’t say I have missed it.

    • Freester 7:47 am on February 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Dave,

      Sorry to read this. Yet I understand completely.

      I just wanted to say without you I wouldn’t have found Flickr, and wouldn’t have found the joys of phototgraphy. During this time I have gone from an MTB’r taking the occasional snap to someone who is quite proud of his photography. It has taken time and effort but I wouldn’t have embarked on this journey if I hadn’t heard of Flickr via you.

      I completely understand your reasons.

      I am getting a bit baffled by the amount of utter crud on Flickr that get’s bombarded with backslapping ‘great shot’ comments, awful awards and zero constructive crit.

      You’ll be missed.

      Mark (aka Freester)

      • Dave Wild 10:30 am on February 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Well, not using Flickr is one thing, giving up on taking and sharing photos another, and I have no intention of giving up those activities :)

    • Lazlo Woodbine 8:58 pm on February 25, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Sorry to see that you’ve more or less left Flickr – thought I hadn’t spotted anything new from you for a while. IMO Flickr is changing / has changed for the worse… but I’m as guilty as anyone for doing the quick and easy ‘great shot’ comment (although I have grown out of the whole award and invite stuff…).

      Don’t know enough about the technical side of things but you’re right, when you think about it, I’ve been on there for 3 years and it hasn’t changed a bit. Oh well, it costs me nothing to be a ‘pro’ so I’ll stick with it (the idiots stopped charging me because I used to be with BTInternet about 8 years ago!).

      Will now bookmark your new sites to keep up to date with your rather wonderful animal and landscape shots.

      Cheers

      Steve

  • Dave 11:22 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , Photography,   

    White Post Farm Photos 

    White Post - November 2009

    White Post - December 2009 

    I was recently asked to take some photos for White Post Farm. What they wanted was some extra photos in the style that I’ve kind of gotten myself in to over the last few years – i.e. fairly silly close-ups that hopefully show some of the animal’s personality.

    I had two visits – the first one was very quick because it chucked it down about an hour after I arrived. The skies were quite dark and grey too so I wasn’t that happy with the resulting photos. I got the opportunity to have a second visit on Friday and the weather was lovely. A very low winter sun posed problems of it’s own, but it was preferable to dark grey skies with poor lighting overall.

    There are a number of shots of that one llama who used every trick in the book to get food out of me – mostly successfully!

     

  • Dave 8:18 am on July 1, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , , , nose, Photography   

    Does my nose look big in this?, originally uploaded by Verrico.

    Just in case you ever wondered how close you have to get in order to get a cow nose!

     

    • greywulf 9:08 am on July 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Love it!

    • brendadada 6:52 pm on July 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Ahah! A solid dry stone wall to lean against, and a stretch of barbed wire between you. Not always so fortunate though?

    • publicenergy 7:06 pm on July 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I view dry stone walls and barbed wire as unfortunate items in the pursuit of cow photos – unless they have the young ones in tow, cows are generally chilled out and inquisitive and seem to like having their photo taken – and seemingly quite like to find out what cameras taste like too!

  • Dave 7:14 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: Photography   

    There’s always something new to see in things you see all the time 

     

    Going to the same places frequently with a camera, it’s easy to fall in to the trap of thinking that you’ve photographed the things you wanted to photograph before and that there isn’t much left. I’ve sometimes felt like that, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s complete and utter cobblers.

    The biggest restrictive factor in me getting photos I enjoy is my own brain telling me not to bother before I’ve even considered taking a photo. I’ve written about this once before. Whenever I have realised I’m self-censoring in this manner, I have to make a decision to break out of it. This sounds weird I know, but if I just go out somewhere with my camera and try and turn my brain off and just go with the flow, I enjoy myself more and I think I get photos that I enjoy more.

    All of the way through school and afterwards, I’ve considered myself a logical, scientific thinking person – my favourite subjects at school were Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Although there is a science and logic to photography, and I can appreciate the time somebody has taken to prefect a scene and light it nicely and have things in just the right positions to be visually pleasing, I can also appreciate photos that are just point and click with no thought whatsoever – or at least an amount of spontaneity.

    I feel like I’m overdue for a day out in a city where I just go nuts with a camera and see what happens. The photos from last time are still amongst my favourites – maybe part of that is the memory of how fun the day was as well as the end result.

    So, considering my logical and scientific background, I find it amusing that years later I seem to be saying that it’s all about how it feels and don’t get hung up on the logical, mechanical and scientific elements of it.

     

    • Bruce 9:13 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      That top image is very effective Dave; at first I thought it was a person the other side of a window in rain, taken on a slow shutter to produce streaking. Then I thought maybe it’s a reflection captured off a highly-scratched steel surface. And finally (I think the correct interpretation), weed in a stream taken from the bank. At full size there’s a ripple over the (presumably photographer’s) face, which is a great obscurification detail (coincidental?). It also looks like a filtered image of a landscape, with the kind of motion in the sky van Gough is famous for. Good work.

    • Primed Minister 10:55 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Yeah, the top image is great. What I like about these kinds of images (especially the more obscure ones) is that it gets you to think a bit more. I really like this no rules approach.

  • Dave 2:41 pm on May 4, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: Photography   

    Responsibilities 

    I don’t really do ’street’ photography. When I’m out taking photographs, I just like to do my own thing and try not to get in the way of other people or upset anyone. My golden rule when photographing people or animals is to make sure they’re happy and I’m not upsetting them by being there with a camera and taking their photo. Animals have been friendly enough to peck me and lick me (I haven’t been that lucky with people while out in public!). Anyway, before this degenerates, the thing that sparked this off was reading this:

    Harassment on the streets of Middlesbrough

    Be sure to click through to read the links contained in that article as well – especially When is it better not to take the photograph.

     

    • brendadada 2:58 pm on May 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I have to say I agree. Once upon a time I did ‘do’ street photography, but this caper has completely put me off attempting the genre further.

  • Dave 8:15 am on April 24, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: linux, Photography,   

    Photography and Linux 

    I use Microsoft Windows every day. Mainly 64 bit versions of Windows Vista because I use the Home Premium variant at home and the Business version at work. I have used Windows on computers for as long as I can remember and it’s so familiar to me and easy to use.

    As for photography, in Windows I can pop in a memory card and have Lightroom grab the images and file them all away in the right place, tagged up with metadata templates applied and then happily browse the photos and make RAW or other adjustments, right-click and export to Flickr or do a multitude of other things with them very easily.

    Considering how easy this process is, I wondered if it was possible to achieve the same thing using Linux. This is out of curiosity more than need.

    So far though, it all seems like going back in time to when graphical user interfaces had just been invented. Everything seems very rudimentary and there are lots of basic things that don’t quite work right that are getting in the way even before I get to looking at a decent photographic workflow.

    The issues that I have so far:

    • I haven’t found any good way to browse a lot of images quickly

    • The image editor (GIMP) doesn’t show me previews when I try and open a file (it just says “Loading Preview…” and sits there (for JPG as well as RAW)

    • My mouse doesn’t have enough buttons available! – this one sounds silly, but I have a mouse with five buttons, the usual 3 on top including the clickable mouse wheel but also two buttons where my thumb lives. I’m so used to using these for forwards and backwards when browsing files or web sites.

    • Graphical acceleration doesn’t work properly with my graphics card. This I find particularly odd because I’m using probably one of the best known manufacturers of chip sets – Nvidia. You’d have thought if any of them would work properly it’d be them!

    • Adobe haven’t released a version of Flash 9 for 64bit Linux so a lot of web sites don’t display correctly.

    Despite these problems, which I’m going to look at sorting out, it is quite pleasant to use for browsing, email and general bits and bobs.

    And after a bit of mucking about I managed to get a music player to find my music and was able to listen to music and have it register with last.fm again. It’s amazing how much more pleasant using it is when you have access to creature comforts like a nice desktop MP3 player – Banshee is quite nice but it does do odd things sometimes. For instance, I paused a track and later closed the application. I later noticed that it was still running and had a little musical note icon near the date on the task bar – so I moved the mouse over it, it displayed a pop-up window showing my paused track, started playing on it’s own for about a second, then closed the application!

    The bit I’ve not mentioned so far is installing. I started off with downloading Ubuntu – mainly because it seems to be flavour of the month and while there is a lot of activity around something, it should in theory be easier to get information and help. However, that turned out to be a right pain. The installation didn’t get very far before I just got a screen full of flashing colours. Another installation attempt and turning on graphical compatibility mode I got further still but then it took exception to my installation CD and bombed out right at the end. Is it honestly too much to ask to check the files on the CD at the start and put them on the hard disk to install from. By this point I was sick of Ubuntu. I thought that if I’m starting off by having to use compatibility modes at the installation point, then it doesn’t bode well for actually using it later.

    So, I did some more digging and research and downloaded another installation image. This time OpenSUSE. I just downloaded a 60Mb boot disk that could install over the internet and fetch whatever it needed. I popped that in, told it where to find the files and let it do it’s stuff. It seemed to correctly identify all of my hardware, suggested the right place to put the disk partitions (something Ubuntu didn’t get right). The placement of partitions was especially impressive becuase my set-up is probably a little unusual. I had prepared two partitions for this prior to starting but Ubuntu didn’t think they were a good first suggestion to use – OpenSUSE did.

    At the moment then, there is no way I can use it to process my photos so I’ll be booting in to Windows and doing it (and probably staying there most of the time). But I’m going to keep looking at this periodically to see if I can sort these problems out and get something nice working.

     

    • greywulf 11:15 am on April 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Yeh. 64-bit Linux is still a way behind the rest of the Linux crowd. It’s, quite frankly, embarassing – I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s crazy given that Linux has a (well deserved) reputation for working on multiple platforms without any issues. It’s one area where Linux needs a serious kick up the a………

      That said, I’m surprised Ubuntu took issue with your machine; the nVidia graphics card should “just work”, though that seems to be the core of your problems. Which release number did you use? 8.04 (the current release candidate) has much better support for 64-bit than before.

      You’re right about SUSE’s default desktop style – it’s a horribly retro design. Thankfully though, that’s very easily fixed. There’s no shortage of MUCH better themes at http://www.kde-look.org/ (for KDE) or http://gnome-look.org/ (for GNOME).

      Your nVidia card will probably need the correct drivers installed; that’s an easy fix – just search for nvidia in the application list (dunno what it’s called in SUSE, sorry!) and install them. My best guess is it’s using the default VESA drivers right now. Ick. You should be able to configure the mouse to your liking in the preferences somewhere – again, I’m no SUSE expert.

      For fast image browsing and organizing I recommend Digikam. That’s a terrific app with much good built-in editing controls that most of the time there’s no need to open up an image editor.

      Phew. Hope that all helps! :)

    • publicenergy 10:15 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks for all that.

      I did have the official Nvidia driver but to no avail. But after trawling the forums I discovered people recommending getting a newer version of CompizFusion. I installed that and things look nice and the Gimp previews work which is nice.

      The initial install I tried was the 8.04 release candidate – the live CD version of which worked in graphics compatibility mode but whenever I tried to use the normal mode, I either got flashing colours or my monitor telling me it’s not playing!

      No luck with the mouse yet, but I’ve not really looked for a solution yet. I did have a look at a mouse configuration screen that showed me a picture of a three button mouse and let me know that I had clicked button 4 and 5 – so it knows they’re there – I just need to find a way to map them to functions.

      I’ll have a look at this Digikam software – it looks promising from what I’ve seen on it’s web site.

    • publicenergy / A New Start 10:57 pm on April 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      [...] was only a couple of days ago when I posted about the posibility of me using Linux and still being able to easily process my photos. Well, [...]

    • DJK 12:12 am on April 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Hi there. I use Vista (32-bit, Business flavour) and Ubuntu (older – 6.06) on this laptop, and find that my workflow is actually marginally quicker with Ubuntu as the OS due to RAM considerations: 2.5GB is just about enough with Vista, and is more than ample with Ubuntu.

      I use the File Manager (or whatever it’s called) to view my files – up to 400% on preview compared to Vista.

      However, I use GIMP on both platforms, and ipernity as my internet photo displayer (used to use Flickr). And Open Office for many other things I hobby about. The fact that Ubuntu installs with GIMP and Open Office out of the box saves oodles of time, and my entire re-installs have taken less than an hour, complete: the longest thing is downloading the latest flavour off ‘tinernet, and creating an iso disc that has to be checked to make sure it works (did you do a checksum on yours ?).

      Oh, and I have a very old laptop which still manages to work, albeit slowly, with an older version of GIMP and xubuntu (6) – and 184MB of RAM :-D

      I’ve tried OPENSuse, too, but that requires several CDs, not just one.

      Partitioning has been a breeze, and is highly customisable: but I tend to perform clean installs, with fresh, formatted hard drives – I can imagine that a well-used and consequently fragmented hard drive would be a nightmare to sort out, with the risk of data loss.

      So, I would say it depends what you use as to which works better: I’m no uber-techy, and only stick with Windows ‘cos I need it for work (or, rather, haven’t converted work to Ubuntu / Linux). But my workflow is actually a little quicker in Linux, and more pleasant for its customisability – and the fact that it is not Microsoft :-D

  • Dave 9:55 pm on April 10, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , , , Photography, social   

    The People of Flickr 

    Fisheye Heaven Wild Style
    “Fisheye Heaven Wild Style” by donna di mondo

    i love books from my flickr friends
    “i love books from my flickr friends” by emdot

    It was a really lovely surprise when I found these two photos on Flickr today. The two people who posted them were the driving force behind me creating that book in the first place so I’m especially glad that they like it. Both of these people also seem to have a knack for homing in on the photos that I actually have the most fun taking as well.

    When I think about it, it’s amazing how you get an impression of people just through their photos and comments left on photos. Quite often I know when I post a photo of a particular type, which of my contacts are likely to home in on it, each having their own tastes and preferences.

    Prior to discovering Flickr I hardly took any photos. That web site was the major influence in me getting so interested in photography. The web site in itself wouldn’t be enough though. I have tried other photo web sites that on the face of it offer the same facilities, but there is always something missing. That something is the people. It’s the one thing that other web sites can’t copy and it’s the main reason why I will continue to use Flickr.

     

  • Dave 11:10 pm on March 5, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: Photography   

    Odd Photographers? Lock ‘em up 

    filth_campaign_persecution

    Read more about this here.

    I’m sure I have done countless things while in view of other members of the public that might have looked odd in order to get a photo. Normally the look on people’s faces can be read as ‘look at that loon with a camera’ rather than ‘quick call the police, that bloke is obviously scoping out the local park in preparation for some future terrorist atrocity.’ This is just another farce in a long line of security related farces.

    I’m a regular reader of Bruce Schneier’s blog which is interesting for lots of reasons, but in relation to this, there are quite a lot of stories where Bruce and his readers have highlighted some absolutely ridiculous security related stories that beggar belief.

    PS. The camera they seem to have drawn a circle around looks like a Canon Ixus – I take further exception to that! If I was paranoid I could conclude that I have been singled out! :p

     

  • Dave 9:38 pm on January 13, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , Photography,   

    Channel 4 – Picture This (after seeing programme 2) 

    I enjoyed the second episode much more than the first one. Firstly, I decided to Tivo the programme and start watching 20 minutes after the start so that I could fast forward through the adverts and recaps. This made it a much more pleasurable viewing experience.

    The challenges were more interesting, and with 4 people instead of 6, there was a bit more time with each person to see what they got up to. Unlike the first week, I found myself agreeing with a lot of what the judges said and I was also pleasantly surprised when the two people I was most impressed with actually went through to the final week.

    I think my favourite individual image from this week’s programme was Ed’s family portrait shot in Hackney. Unfortunately for him, Lucinda and Liz each had a couple of good images and they were also trying new things when they were out and about. I was particularly impressed with Lucinda who managed to get in to the royal box at the polo match – that was a good effort – possibly made easier by having a camera crew in tow! Regardless of how she got in there though, she got a good image and seemed to have a good week overall. If I were a betting man, I think my money would be on Lucinda winning next week. I’m just glad the right two made it to the final really.

     

    • Digi 1:32 pm on January 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Could not agree more. Ed was too far up his own bum. Aron really blew it with his final choice of images. I am tempted to back Lucinda but have a strange feeling Liz may sneak it.

  • Dave 9:32 pm on January 6, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , Photography,   

    Channel 4 – Picture This (after seeing programme 1) 

    c4picthiusscreenshot

    I mentioned Picture This yesterday and have just watched the first programme. It suffered from the same things most modern TV programmes suffer from – assuming their viewers are idiots with no attention span. Reminding me after each break what happened a few minutes before. Having introductions every 10 minutes telling me what’s about to happen in the next 10 minutes and things like that. When you cut out all of that crap, you’re left with surprisingly little content. That’s true of a lot of TV though, so I can’t single this program out just for that!

    What was left of the content was fairly interesting if a little frustrating. The first task was to produce a portrait shot that brought out the personality of the person being photographed. However, it didn’t look like that’s what the contestants had been told and it looked more likely that this brief had been fleshed out in editing afterwards – either that or they all ignored it which seems unlikely. The difficulty for us, the viewer, to decide if we thought the photographer had done a good job of this task or not was made near impossible because we’d barely heard any of them speak and knew nothing about them. We were lucky if we’d got 3 or 4 sentences out of them by that stage.

    What we did get to see a lot of though were the three judges – especially that Martin Parr character. I think it would have been better if the judges had been a more varied bunch – all three of them are in the business of photography – it would have been nice to have a few that were just interested in the creative side.

    The mentor, Joy Gregory did seem to talk more sense than the judges and seemed to be talking about the creative side of things rather than the money making potential of the images, so she was a breath of fresh air. Even so, we didn’t get that much out of her compared to the judges either.

    All of the contestants produced some good images but the final decision about which two would have to leave seemed a bit strange to me. The most uncomfortable part of the program was watching the chap trying to stage his dancing children shot next to Brighton beach and earlier wandering around wondering what to do before finally finding a street cleaner to use as part of a photo. You can put a lot of that down to nerves and pressure but I would have imagined this contestant to be in the first batch to be dispatched.

    After that it was a tough call.

    I had prior knowledge of one of the contestants – Jay from the program, who is on Flickr as J L M. I find his Flickr stream of a very high quality and very stylish, so I was quite disappointed when he was voted off – however, his work raises it’s head above most things I see on Flickr. I think his portrait of the other contestant that the judges said she was too small in was my favourite of all of the portraits regardless of what the judges said.

    Unfortunately, the Picture This web site seems to have been unavailable for most of the day, so I couldn’t use it to fact check the contestant and judge names above.

    I’ll definitely watch the next two programs though to see how this pans out.

     

    • Roger B. 10:01 pm on January 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Bugger… I forgot it was on.

      Sounds like a fine example of “short attention span telly”.

    • publicenergy 10:11 pm on January 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      It’s repeated at 5AM on Tuesday!

      It doesn’t seem to be available on the 4OD service unfortunately.

    • greywulf 10:14 pm on January 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I agree with you all the way; I hate goldfish program making like this too.

      I’d have like to see more about the “why” and “how” than the “who”. There way too much repetition, too much about the judges and not enough about the decision making processes involved. Mind you, considering that Martin Parr is one of the judges, what would make a “good” image would be entirely questionable anyhow :)

      Shame, really. I hope the rough edges and weak attempts to be Dragon’s Den disappear over the next few episodes.

    • Nick P 11:08 pm on January 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Nice article above that completely reflects my thoughts too.

      I still can’t quite understand how their recruitment was obviously for AMATEUR photographers (and even billed as Britain’s Next Best Digital Photographer), yet suddenly on the show they expect them to be all professionals who are used to taking shots of stars and working in a studio.

      As for Martin Parr… well my Mother always taught me that if you’ve nothing good to say then say nothing at all!

    • ELLIEPOTS 7:34 am on January 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I was incensed that the contestant who staged his shot and manipulated it using photoshop should have been disqualified!!! Totally unethical and gives the name of photographer a bad name.

    • pauline 8:20 am on January 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      the comment that we’d hardly heard the photographers speak was very true. We were given very little about the backgrounds of the photographers and where they were coming from. Fromthe very quick snapshots of theier earlier work it would’ve been interesting to know more about them and what was behind their photographs. There were statements being made by the photographers that werent fully explained as not enough time!

    • brendadada 8:37 am on January 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      “that Martin Parr character”

      Heh. I have reviewed my opinion of Parr this past year after looking at more of his work. He was bete noir of the profession back in the 70s and 80s, chopping off heads, making cruel portraits, all pretty ubiquitous devices now. I love his Ireland series’, especially the lone car in the rainy landscape photos. I met a friend of his this winter (did her house photos) which was a nice surprise: she knew exactly what she was talking about, photos-wise, which was really helpful to me.

      Picture This seemed like yet another of the reality TV genre, and this assumption that just anyone can do it, particularly studio work, is a big stretch. There /must/ have been tuition: it would have been useful to see that. But it’s not telly for photographers, is it? They’ll have random celebs doing it next – Strictly Pictures. ;)

      Does anyone else think that calling photographs ‘images’ is particularly telling?

    • Hitesh Sawlani 1:34 pm on January 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      It’s on the Channel 4 on demand service now… but you have to be in the UK to access it.

      It’s also available in “other” online resources

    • dmt195 9:01 pm on January 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Nice review. I thought the same really. I watched it using the 4OD service and without the ads all the ‘recapping’ is really obvious and annoying. Otherwise I found it fairly interesting.
      I found myself thinking it was a little weird forcing these wildly different characters (creatively and technically speaking) into short timescale commercial ‘projects’. If each had a week to think of something and record their own video diary while they carried their ideas through it may have been a bit more interesting.

    • Channel 4 - Picture This (afte 9:38 pm on January 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      [...] enjoyed the second episode much better than the first one. Firstly, I decided to Tivo the programme and start watching 20 minutes after the start so that I [...]

    • Dan 8:47 pm on January 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Interesting comments on Picture This. Low attention span telly it certainly was – in so many ways. Professional photographers are pretty sanguine about the competition from ‘amateur’ photographers these days but the real problem for our business and the industry in general is the erosion of the 1988 Copyright Act which states that the creator is the owner of the photographic image unless they sell on the copyright or licence the usage. PIctureThis was sponsored by Flickr who commonly allow content to be used free of charge by advertising clients with no legal obligation to reward the photographer or even publish a picture credit. In addition the Channel 4 “Picture This” website invites you to upload your work and again the term and conditions transfer all photograph usage to Channel 4 – in perpetuity.

      That Martin Parr is involved, however inadvertently, in such a way is depressing as Magnum was founded to protect people from such exploitation in the first place. Almost every “public” competition is now run as an image grab exercise as imagery is a valuable resource.

      A programme looking at the actual “business” of photography would be worth seeing but as the TV channels are involved in the exploitation it isn’t likely to happen!

      Kind regards

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