Morven Photo: Words

My blogging experience is recent having begun to post a photograph per day since mid May 2005 as you can see at Morven Photoblog. I have been playing about with photos on the web, both at Photo Net and then following inspiration from Lara Barrett on Flickr and then on to my first photo blog at Blogspot.

Some Problems

All of these adventures were fun and have led me to grow as a photographer - I will return to using Flickr at least in the not too distant future. There were problems with all of them however:

• for me Photo Net became a little bit silly with a lot of stupid ratings wars going on whereby people would rate their mates highly and attack others with no reference to the photograph in question. For example, one bizarre experience where a fellow sent me a whole string of increasingly aggressive emails because I had rated his photograph as average - which in my view it is. It was particularly disappointing because he is a wonderful photographer and I had previously rated some of his images excellent.
• Flickr is an excellent opportuunity to post images on the net and to exchange views and become a member of a community. Overall the level of photography and critique is not as hich as Photo.net. The problem has been that Flickr has become a victim of its own success and often pictures are unavailable and the thing collapses due to lack of server/bandwith resources - others tell me that this is getting better now; hence my idea to return to it.
• Blogspot was a great learning tool for me, but it was dependent upon Flickr and the system lacked flexibility and options provided by PixelPost which is the software used in the photoblog.

Photography ‘Pedigree’

Photography has always been an interest of mine since about my seventh birthday when my aunt and uncle gave me a simple 35mm camera as a Christmas gift. Many images of my thumb were duly captured (perhaps the origins of my fascination for studying objects from a variety of angles and perspectives As time moved on, ambition increased - probably based on the mistaken belief that a better camera would make me a better photographer a Zorki 4k rangefinder camera appeared on the scene in my teens. This was followed by an Olympus OM10 which remains in my posession.

Following marriage and children, photography took very much a back seat in life - a series of compact cameras came and went together with baby, children and family photographs. The emergence of digital cameras stirred a renewed interest and culminating in the purchase of an Olympus C50Z on impulse at an airport in December 2002 - much to the amusement of my then work colleagues who were convinced the enjoyment was in the chase!. This simple purchase reinvigourated creative juices and led to a most enjoyable time since. So much fun was this activity that a Nikon D70 joined the camera collection in July 2004 following a change of employer (and hence the funds to do so).

Like many of us, my desire is to improve my personal photography by simply doing it and also by enjoying and commenting on the work of others.

Why is This Here?

As you can see, I am an ordinary guy who likes photography - with no special qualifications. My trawls of the net for information relating to the everyday issues facing people like me who want to learn more have found resources scarce. Thus the idea was born to try to collect stuff together and also add my own personal flavour to it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Please leave a comment, nothing would be more delightful than entering into a dialogue to help us both improve - no assertion is made that all written here is correct, simply that it is my opinion or state of knowledge and that I am flexible enough (and thick skinned enough) to change in the light of new information.

No doubt more will be written here soon - I am getting to grips with the fabulous WordPress to manage this blog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Biography, Blogging, Flickr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.