In my opinion, “Réponses Photo” is one of the most consistently good general interest photographic magazines on the market. While it covers gear and technique - how could it not, and remain in business - the core material is really dedicated to photography and photographers. But every 12 months, it bows to market pressures and publishes its annual “Spécial Matériel”, a comprehensive buyers guide to what is now the digital camera market only.  I guess they might follow up with a short film / analogue section in next month’s issue.

I have to confess, in years past I was probably as guilty of fantasising over the hundred or so pages of technological temptation as anyone else other male photographer with a pulse. But nowadays I’m left pretty much cold by it all. What does get my pulse racing in this issue is the article by Sylvie Hughes about the Aeolian Islands volcanos. This is one of my favourite locations, and while I’m not exactly daydreaming about the latest insignificant iteration of Canikon’s DXYZ1234-X-PRO-Turbo, I am constantly thinking about places I want to visit and revisit, discover and get to know, and maybe even photograph.  Spend all the working week chained to a desk, and most of the weekend recovering from it, I don’t even find time to visit the fantastic locations I have close by, except for a snatched couple of hours every month or so.

I guess for some Gear Acquisition Syndrome is partly a mechanism to dull the frustration of not being able to get out there and photograph. But it doesn’t work for me anymore.  There are some cameras I still kind of fantasise about, but they’re either out of reach, like the Linhof 612 (and also more or less out of time, in that case), _way_ out of reach, like the Pentax 645D, or they don’t exist (a rugged DSLR with swivel scree that takes Tilt/Shift lenses - which, anyway, would be out of reach!).

But frankly I’d swap all of that for an extra 4, or even 2 weeks of vacation every year, so that I can use and enjoy the ridiculous amount of stuff I’ve already got. And for that matter, enjoy the world.

Ouch.  That’s what my eyes tell me when I see this - sorry, AL&S, nothing to do with your classic alpine scene, just how New Improved Flickr has delivered it to me.

I’ve always found Flickr to be, basically, the worst online photo sharing site except for all the others. Now, it has torpedoed itself on two fronts. The aesthetic changes are truly horrible, and the financial changes would make Abobe’s bean counters blush.

I’ve been fairly careful about how I prepare images for Flickr, with borders designed to set the photo off against the white background. This is now totally screwed, most of my photos look dreadful on the new layout. I’ve always complained about how badly Flickr presents panoramic formats - ironically, this has now improved significantly, taken alone, but the combination of all photos pushed together like sardines in a can, and the ridiculous formatting of portrait format seriously puts the balance well into the negative.

My biggest gripe against other sites such as 500px and WhyTake is that they decide to present my photos as standard square crops, in gallery views, which makes a total mockery of any pretence at being designed for photography. However, 500px does have a major plus point from my point of view, which is its emphasis on portfolios over single photos.  I generally edit my photos as part of some set or narrative, and this never really works on Flickr.

Another thing which the new layout loses is the nicely positioned title.  On Flickr, at least, the title has always been a equal partner to the image in my uploads. Now it just hides part of the image. As does the user avatar, overlaid on the photo.  I can’t believe that any even semi-serious photographer was involved in this redesign.

And it is as slow as s**t, if it loads at all.

Of course, there is always a negative reaction against unexpected change, so I’m not necessarily going to throw my toys out of the pram just yet.  But for now, I will no longer be uploading any new photos to Flickr, and I may well decide to delete my account, if it just makes my photography look even more crap than it actually is. And that’s quite an accomplishment.

For now, see you on 500px.

A bit late, but better than never.

I’d like to wish all readers and visitors to snowhenge a belated happy Christmas, and a wonderful 2013. I’ve been rushing around a wet and windswept Belgium for the last few days, so there’s been little activity in these parts.

Bruges, a few days ago.

It’s been an interesting year, for me, with quite a few changes, and maybe some more to come. And in a couple of days we’ll leaving for Argentina, then a few weeks later Antarctica by way of Ushuaia. And I still haven’t finished packing yet.

I’ve managed to get quite a lot of photography done this year, and I feel I’ve made some progress too. After a few bad-tempered isolationist rants against the web in general earlier this year, I’m feeling considerably more positive and open now. What I haven’t really managed to do is to find a way to get more of my stuff out into the world, but I’ve got a few ideas on how to improve that.

Thanks to you, for reading this - according to my statistics about 99% of visitors here leave no comment, but that’s fine. Et je ne comprends pas pourquoi, mais le pays duquel vient ici le plus grand hombre d’internautes est la France. Go figure.

So, Bonne Année, bonne santé, and hope to see you around.

Yep, it’s PHOTOKINA WEEK, and since this is some kind of a photography site, I’d better waffle about gear and stuff and all the AWE-SOME things lining up to grab our credit cards.

The good

Well, I hope so anyway. Lasersoft’s Silverfast 8 HDR Studio finally slipped out of Beta a few days ago, presumably in order to get promoted at Photokina, although Lasersoft seem to be being pretty quiet about it. The link to the new version is of course broken, bless ‘em, as it still points to v6.6, but the demo link works and the demo can be serialised. So far I haven’t had time to explore it, but when I do I’ll write a review.

The bad

Not exactly Photokina, but anyway it’s certainly bad news. No, not Fuji killing off movie film, but the acquisition by the disgusting Google of NiK software, which will almost certainly result in the disappearance of excellent products such as DFine and Silver Efx, and the mutating of Snapseed into me-too Instagram to let talentless narcissists like this one (sorry, I know he’s popular, but emperor, clothes etc) upload thousands of photos a day, have them auto-processed and handed over to Google’s scary advertising engine. Well anyway Patrick LaRoque puts it far better than I can.

And the Ugly…

It’s no contest really, is it ? Unbelievable. Aghast doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Swedish design meets Italian engineering. Or is the other way around ? I’m sure half of Saudi Arabia is already sending the slaves out to queue up for it. Poor old Victor must be doing about 180rpm.

I don’t really understand how people do it. People who post one - or more - masterpieces a day on Flickr, on their blogs, on their websites. Photos they took the day before, with a camera they bought last week, and will have discarded next month. The pressure to “keep up” gets so overwhelming that sometimes I want to give up on this whole interaction stuff, or give up on photography altogether. I could just stop taking new photographs now, and spend my remaining years reprocessing, fine tuning, giving some of my archive the attention it might deserve.

I’ve got so many different projects, all unfinished, all seemingly endless. For example, I decided to revisit a large folder of slides from my Antarctic years which I’d discarded as no good. Most them are indeed hopeless, but some, in fact quite a lot, have a degree of documentary or personal interest, and a few are potentially hidden gems. I’m maybe half way through the initial “raw” scans. Since my expectations are not that high anyway, and I’m not looking for anything larger than an A4 print, I decided to scan them to 64bit linear (the other 16 bits are the IR channel) on my Canoscan 9000F, rather than my slower film scanner, but even then it takes ages. And then I have to reprocess to “normal” 48 bit in Silverfast HDR, then finally touch up in Photoshop. Probably quite a lot, considering their state.  And then there are the several hundred which I considered “ok” in the past, many of which have never been scanned, or at least not properly. And that’s project 1.

A sample from Project 1: looking over Rothera base, on Adelaide Island”

Then there’s a huge backlog of digital images, many taken this year in Italy and France, especially of the lavender fields in the Var, and of flamingoes in the Camargue, which I’ve hardly touched upon, or which need reworking from scratch due to my reversal out that disaster of a piece of software called “Mountain Lion”. And still from this year, their’s a whole bunch of shots from Iceland in February which remain in limbo. 

I have 38513 photos in my Aperture catalog, going back to December 2003. Many, many of these deserve further attention. And before 2003 ? Well I’ve got two shelves full of slide binders, and a very full MediaPro catalog.

And then… my ongoing obsession with the XPan is all very well, but the workflow of getting an image of film into my archive is heavy going, and there again there are backlogs.  And stuff from the last decade screaming to be rescanned, for example a whole batch from New Zealand over 10 years ago.

And finally, what for ? Almost nobody sees this stuff. I’ve no real idea how may visits this website gets. It’s not zero, but it’s not very high either. Sometimes I get a few comments on Flickr, but for me 10 is a lot. Possibly I don’t do enough networking. Possibly my photos are not interesting, or don’t reach the level now needed to rise above the noise.

And yet every day bloggers like Kirk Tuck or Ming Theing are showing what they did in the last 5 minutes with their new camera, while at the same time regularly delving into their archives, AND writing several feature length blog posts a day.

I mean, what are they ON ?