“detach” - my 1000th, and last photo on Flickr”

Yesterday I was playing around with an interpretation of a photo I took a few months back, which I quite like, and decided to post it on Flickr.  As I was doing so, I noticed it was my 1000th post. So, my statistics since joining in October 2006 are 1000 photos, 606’049 views, 725 “faves” (so it says, but that can’t be right, as 806 photos have at least 1 “fave”), and whatever else.  And I have 456 loyal followers - thanks everybody - which is not bad considering how little I give back.

My all time most popular shot is this, which I honestly think is pretty dull at best - yet it has 16’394 views, 523 “faves” and 29 comments.  Go figure, as our Merkin cousins would say.

Flickr is certainly my most successful venture into social media by far, which isn’t saying much. But I think it’s time to bring it to an end. I don’t get much benefit or enjoyment from it any more. Possibly I never did, although it was a useful safety valve during a period up to about 2010 when I was working under extreme stress in a startup environment.  When getting home to my 1 room apartment, catching up on Flickr was a good way to to switch off and relax.  But that was in its heyday, and possibly mine too. Now I just log in out of a sense of duty.

Photographically I know all too well which buttons to press in Flickr.  Any number of dramatic long exposure waterfalls are pretty much guaranteed to trigger the “Explore” algorithm. And such photos attract a fair amount of traffic (I wouldn’t call most of it “feedback”). So if trawling for likes was my thing, I guess I could do that fairly well. On the other hand photos I care a little more about, such as the one featured here, generally sink without a trace.  That’s ok too, I get it that my tastes are at best qualified as non-mainstream, and more accurately as dubious.  But finally if there is no engagement, there’s no point.

In any case, I’m finding less and less need to share. This might reflect the fact that globally there is less and less appetite to discover.  Everybody is a photographer, everybody wants to be famous, and pretty much a “like” given is done so only in the expectation of two given in return. The number of people selflessly advocating other’s photography is approaching zero.

Flickr won’t miss me (especially as I only recently paid for a 2 year subscription). But hitting 1000 seems like a good cue to bow out.

(Of course I reserve the right to completely change my mind at any time)

Seems that for a lot of photographers the current lockdown has a silver lining, as it provides time to organise, curate, edit and generally sort out photography backlogs. It should be the same for me, but somehow I’m finding it even harder to focus on these activities right now. But I certainly have a backlog. In fact my backlog has backlogs. I’m sure if I just let things drift, I’ll regret it, if and when normality returns, so I’m trying to get stuff done by dividing tasks up into small slices.  In that way, I’m managing to work through the huge pile of photos acquired during the Antarctic leg of my last little jaunt.

First I managed to whittle down some 6000 photos to 1300. It’s a start, but 6000 is way too many for a 2 week period. Then again, I think that most people on the same trip have far, far more, as they pretty much all were shooting continuously, at rates of lots of frames per second, while I pretty much always stuck to single frames.

This is probably to my detriment. After all, I have a camera (Olympus E-M1 MkII if you want to know) which is capable of insane frame rates, so why don’t I use it? There are several reasons for this - one, I really don’t have the mindset of a wildlife photographer, where the downside of having to sift through mountains of near-identical photos has the upside of retrieving one or two real gems. Second, I’m too lazy (or old, or stupid, or all three) to learn how to do it properly. Whatever, I still ended up with 6000 photos.

Actually, I wasn’t really expecting the trip to be quite so heavily oriented towards wildlife photography, although with hindsight I really should have been, and should have prepared for it. So I was thrown into a situation where the priority was wildlife, and lots of it, and that is not within my comfort zone. I discovered that for most people an iceberg was not very interesting if it didn’t have a penguin or a seal on it. I’ve learned that dedicated wildlife photographers have the ability to pre-conceive a particular shot that they want, and are prepared to spend literally hours waiting for it. And for this they need to be fully prepared and to have complete mastery of their equipment. And they need patience.

I don’t have any of this.  If I’m given 3 hours to wander around a location, then my main object will be to see as much of that location as I can. I may pick up some photos along the way, in my usual opportunistic way, and I may even spend some time trying to get a particular shot that I’ve identified on the spot, but any notion of conceiving of what I want to photograph usually comes only with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.  So, I use inappropriate settings, my output is random and generally poor, and I get annoyed with myself. However, at the other extreme, I’ve seen people achieve the single shot they wanted less than 1 hour into a 3 hour shore trip, and at that point fold up and head back to the ship. In my way of thinking, they are missing opportunities, but I guess from a photographic point of view they’re showing discipline, and the net result is that they have pre-curated their shots, and actually have little follow up work to do other than discarding the 95% of frames which they don’t need.  It’s an approach which has some clear attractions.  And, if you look at the work of one of my trip companions, Richard Barrett, you can see it works very well.

And penguins… well, it’s easy to photograph penguins. Actually sometimes it’s hard NOT to photograph penguins. They get in everywhere. It is harder to isolate a single penguin, and even harder to make that into an interesting photograph. I’m not 100% sure why we even try - penguins are above all highly social animals, and seeing them in isolation somehow seems a bit sad. The holy grail, it seems, these days in penguin photography is to try to get that “fog” foreground look, where you get a band of out of focus snow in the lower part of the frame. Finding clean snow around penguins is also hard, as they can’t get toilet paper in Antarctica, and since they nest on exposed rock getting them to pose nicely in snow is hard too. I was actually more interested in getting shots featuring penguins in a wider environment, sometimes even to the point that you don’t first notice the bird. This is also not original. And in any case over time I sucombed to peer pressure and image reviews telling me this wasn’t what I should be doing. Perhaps, more accurately, I just wasn’t doing it very well.

Anyway, with my small batch at a time approach, I’ve made some headway into curation and processing. So here, from that work in progress, is a small sample of the penguin side of my latest attempts at wildlife photography.

I am absolutely delighted to present my second set of photos from last September’s perambulations in East Greenland, which I have cunningly named “Greenland Landscapes” in order to trick you into thinking you have not, in fact, been presented with an eye-searingly dreadful set of kitsch postcards.

As the blurb says, this is “a companion set to Greenland Icescapes, also taken in the fjord complex around Illoqqortoormiut, formerly known as Scoresbysund, in East Greenland. Proper landscape photographers hate blue skies and bright sunlight. I prefer to take conditions as they come and work around them without too many preconceived ideas”.

I do actually get irritated by landscape photographers (and especially wildlife photographers) whining on and on that the weather isn’t shite enough and contrast and shadow and bla effing bla.  Normal people (i.e. non-photographers) actually like sunshine and blue sky. So do I. Sure, there’s nothing like making the 27 millionth identical heavily overbaked shot of a dark brooding sky over some godforsaken Scottish beach, but, hey, let’s maybe try something a bit different just once in a while, ok?

(Actually just in case anybody involved is reading, this particular rant was absolutely not triggered by the Greenland crew…  more from the other end of the planet)

Oh and for those who need to know, as pretty much is always the case around here, this set was created using the fine (and very weatherproof) tools designed in Tokyo by The Olympus Corporation.  I’m not being paid to say that but I’m certainly open to offers!

Finally I’m starting to break the logjam of my photo backlog: I’ve just published a new gallery of iceberg photos taken in East Greenland in September 2019.

Feedback is always welcome, even if it is negative.

On Saturday I finally got home after leaving King George island, Antarctica on Wednesday afternoon. A long trip even if for the first time it involved flying over the Drake Passage rather than being thrown all over a ship for 3 miserable days.

So, this was my fifth visit to Antarctica, and third as a tourist, and this time it was pretty intense. Sharing the small ship Hans Hansson with 9 other passengers, 2 guides and 6 crew is a lot more intimate than a cruise ship or research vessel. And the flexibility of a small ship meant reaching little visited locations, and also visiting more popular spots outside of regular hours. With up to three three to four hour landings per day, over 12 days, what little downtime we had was very welcome. The ship is owned and operated by Quixote Expeditions, and was chartered by Visionary Wild. Both companies showed the highest level of professionalism and dedication to excellence, both before and during the trip, with all staff and crew being very friendly and approachable.

Without really wanting to single anybody out, I have to mention Justin Black, founder of Visionary Wild. Justin is a model of what every phototour leader should aspire to. Apart from, incidentally, being an excellent photographer, he was a fantastic leader, always available to help with anything, keeping everybody safe but unconstrained, and proactively ensuring that everybody was happy. His co-leader, Daisy Gilardini, a photographer with well over 20 Antarctic tours to her name, was equally supportive, and in particular able to lend her expertise to the enthusiastic, if not obsessive wildlife photographers that made up 8/10ths of the clientele.

And those 8/10ths were the only slight problem from my point of view, as I am absolutely not an obsessive wildlife photographer. So I did sometimes get frustrated when the odd iceberg was pronounced totally uninteresting because it didn’t have a bloody penguin nailed to it. Being more a kind of ambient landscape person myself, and also fascinated by the human footprint on Antarctica, I have to say at times I just put the cameras down. This was compounded by the fact that I’m continuing to go through a very dark patch photographically speaking, and I only really got into some sort of groove in the last two days, where we were being forced by strong winds to find some very out of the way locations. Generally if I were to consider only photography as a measure, then for me personally this trip was an abject failure and a massive wasted opportunity (and particularly a very rare close up encounter with a playful leopard seal which I completely failed to capture). Fortunately, I don’t live for photography, and on the upside, it was wonderful to see my very photographically modest partner Luchiana suddenly blossom into a very fine photographer, putting assorted Leica, Nikon and Sony mega-camera owners to shame with her simple travel zoom Canon.  It’s always been latent, but now she has received plaudits she cannot dismiss.

As for the what worked, what didn’t work part… well, my Atlas Athlete backpack was fantastic, being flexible enough for full day mountain treks in Patagonia as well as onshore and Zodiac work in Antarctica. A fully dedicated camera bag might have been slightly better in Antarctica, but it is very marginal, and would have been a nightmare for trekking. I continue to be impressed by Sealskin gloves, even though I suffer from chronically cold hands (but never feet). On the camera side, the Olympus E-M1 Mkii pair gave the usual Jekyll & Hyde performance - working fine all day then suddenly absolutely refusing to focus the moment something ultra interesting came along. This might have been down to the new 2x Teleconverter on the 40-150 lens, but generally this worked very well. As usual the Olympus manages sometimes to get into completely mystifying modes now and then, but possibly this has to do with too many buttons and clumsy gloves. At times I was ready to throw the whole damn lot in the ocean, but mindful of IATO rules in pollution and the fact that I can’t think of any other system which I’d hate a bit less, I didn’t.  Certainly I didn’t envy the laughably huge 400 and 600mm full frame lenses my companions were touting, even if I have to admit they are less heavy than they look. As is the Fuji GFX100 which Justin was using, but that camera lives in a different universe to me.

So here I am with 5800 more photos from Antarctica, mostly crap, and nearly 1000 from Patagonia, and I still haven’t completed my edit of 3000 from Greenland or indeed 1600-odd from Madeira. I think I’ve got enough photos for now.

So, will there be a sixth Antarctic trip? At present I doubt it. The piggy bank is gutted, and anywhere there are other places to see. Even Antarctica is now beginning to suffer from mass tourism, with vast cruise ships lining up through the Neumayer Channel and around Paradise Bay.

But never say never…