Lighten Up

The DS blog has had a bit of a makeover to refresh the layout and feel of the website. I was getting a bit fed up of the dark theme and thought it was time to lighten up. Brighten up.

Another bonus to the new theme was a widening of the sidebar which has also been tweaked to include the new widgets for Twitter and Instagram photos.

I have tried to add my feed from App.net but so far no luck. Looks like it will remain a work in progress. For some reason the widget doesn’t recognise the RSS feed.

So there we have it. I rather like the lighter look and the sidebar is much, much better. 🙂

A Portrait of Hamish

This rather impressive looking chap is Hamish, or if you want to use his full title – Hamish McKay Denovan. This shot was taken and uploaded to Instagram but also shared on Twitter via MobyPicture. This portrait of Hamish is the most viewed image I’ve had recently on a social network and the retweeting of the photo started almost instantaneously.

Mountainous landscapes of Glen Coe… meh! Scottish castles and lochs…. meh! A picture of a Highland cow…. yay!!! Why some images take on a life of their own after release onto the net, while others do not, is the reason why photography, and how we view and consume images, is so fascinating. Some photographs just hit the right audience and surprisingly Highland cattle appear to have quite a following out there on the internet. One re-tweet even came from a Highland cow who claimed he was a relative! 🙂

As regular followers of the blog may already know, this summer saw me start using Instagram, the photo social network app that allows you to add filters and upload images. The real test for any social network service is how the user engages with it, and Instagram, while it looks relatively limited in usefulness, is actually quite adaptable as a publishing platform. It’s fast, convenient and can be used in any number of ways. How you use the service is pretty much up to you and the variety of use is quite amazing. Family albums, celebrity worship, photojournalism, fine art photography, magazines, news channels and more can all to be found on Instagram. If you think that it’s all about pictures of feet or cats (there is a bit of that of course) then you’d be wrong. Instagram has a very varied user base with a broad range of photography to follow.

Distribution seems to be key for Instagram’s success, even though the filters usually get all the headlines. The photography is uploaded to the same place making it easy for others to view and follow the work of a specific photographer. You can quickly develop an audience that’s all on one website, able to view your work in one place but with the added benefit of also spreading the message outside of the Instagram family using Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr. For me, and it seems for Hipstamatic too,  that is where the the real strength of the Instagram network lies. Although I only upload images taken with my iPhone to Instagram, a number of photographer upload images shot on other cameras. Many photographers seem to use other photo apps to get their images and then upload to their Instagram account. Instagram is, at its core, just a very simple photo blog that’s easy to follow and publish to, with the added benefit of being extremely portable on your mobile phone. No wonder photographers, and especially photojournalists, love it!

So as you can see i have gone from a sceptic to a fan. Last month, in Scotland, I found Instagram a very useful tool for simple sharing what I saw. Often I would shot using just the iPhone’s camera app, then later tweak the images in Snapseed and publish to Instagram. The process worked really well and I’ll certainly be doing something similar again on the next trip up there in 2013.

Recently a great series of blog posts came out detailing the confused situation at Hipstamatic and how they view Instagram. It makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the photo app/photo social network business.

The articles can be found HERE

Check out my Scotland and Skye Instagram images HERE

For Tweet’s Sake

I did myself a BIG favour during the Jubilee week. I stopped tweeting. The only tweets that landed on my twitter page that week (apart from a reply to a tweet) were the automated Photography Daily News ones pushed out around 5pm every night. To my surprise i found that i didn’t miss it.

My reasons for the tweeting break were many, but at the heart of it was a need to get away from it.. I adore Twitter and find that it’s great for finding out what’s going on out in the world of photography. It must be said though that a number of tweeters easily meet the EU quota for being self indulgent, self promoting, and self important. I don’t follow them but their ‘opinions’ still make it through to my photography feed. Dammit!

Even worse, these people don’t’ usually work as photographers, will jump on any passing bandwagon they can find, and dominate discussions in the belief that their opinions matter more than anyone else’s. They may know bugger all about a subject, but they will still blog about it as though THEY are the fountain of all knowledge. I won’t even go into the levels of negativity found on Twitter sometimes.

So what’s the cure? Tweeting breaks.  I’ve got more on the way over the summer where the Twitter feed can just take care of itself. I will do something else.