David Emery OnlinePhotography
29 May 2007
I don’t, as a general rule, believe in things like karma or fate.
It’s all made up rubbish designed for simple minds*.
However, after writing this a few months ago I’m willing to concede that I rather set myself up for a fall. If you haven’t guessed – or were too lazy to follow that link – I had a sick day today, having been caught out by a nasty cold that crept up on me over the holiday weekend. Hence, no major thinking today.
It does however, mean I’ve managed to do a little tinkering with my blog – if you look down at the bottom of the home page you’ll see I’m bringing in my last 10 photos from my Flickr stream. This was achieved really incredibly easily using the vdh_flickr plugin for Textpattern, which does exactly what I wanted (and a lot more besides). It all took about 15 minutes to set up, including CSS-ing etc, which is nice!
Of course, finally adding photos as a feature to this site is indicative of two things: firstly, and most obviously, I’m taking a hell of a lot more photos then I ever have before, and this is completely down to my Canon G7 which I got last December. It pretty much has similar specifications to my previous camera (a Minolta Dimage 7), other then a massive increase in megapixels (5->10) which I don’t really care for that much; the key thing, though, is its size.
The G7 is small.
While not being an “ultra compact”, it’s small enough (and tough enough) so I can take it with me everywhere – it permanently lives in my bag, which is something I could never to previously. Now, anytime I feel the urge I can start snapping off photos – hence the “in the pub” photos currently featuring (I particularly like how this one of James turned out).
The upside – and downside – of this is that I can fill my 1Gb memory card without a problem – certainly at gigs, at least – which equates to about 300 photos. I really don’t know how people managed on film. Luckily for me, Aperture perfectly fits my workflow so processing that many photos really doesn’t take too long – probably about 30mins or so, which I don’t think is too bad.
The second thing is that I’ve now finally, 4 years after everyone else, jumped firmly aboard the Flickr bandwagon. There just simply isn’t a better way of regularly getting photos online, which I guess is why I didn’t bother previously – I wasn’t taking enough pictures to bother getting them online.
It just shows, I guess, how important it is to remember that no matter how good your service is, if your potential users aren’t doing the right things to make it useful to them there’s not much you can do about it; all you can do is wait for the users to change.