Monday 19 December 2011

On snow and the need for Frankenfenders



Here is the Frankenfender MKII. MKI Frankenfender was great, but had a problem in that the whip part (shown here - the front fender off of a cheap set of mtn bike snap on fenders) was too narrow and my back, rack, and bags were getting "trashed" when riding in the snow with the new and improved huge snow tires of doom. The problem that required the reinstallation of the Frankenfender MKI was the fact that the new tires simply could not be mounted in a standard fender without the studs picking. There would have been no clearance for snow or water and this would have resulted in some serious spray back and annoyance. So, after some experimentation, I decided that the good old "slice the vinegar bottle in half and bolt it to your bike like a geek" approach was much preferred to being wet. 
Makes me want to get out on the bike and see if I stay dry!

Sunday 18 December 2011

The afternoon today ended pleasantly with a walk around the Huron natural area in Kitchener. I went with Martin, and we brought the dslrs and tripods along. Somewhat optimistically, I brought more than the wider of my lenses in the hopes that we might see some beavers, but we had no luck there with that today. What we did manage to get was some nice enough wintery landscapes. I want to return there later in the winter, after a huge heavy snow fall, and take these over again.





Lately, I have been trying to stretch myself a bit photographically and think of new ways to convey an image I have in my head.

Take the simple image of someone drinking a mug of hot chocolate in a cafe. On the surface, it is a simple enough thing, but I wanted to have a little bit of fun with it and fit it into an idea I had. The idea is straight forward - compose a picture as a cube. Square crops, six photos, all showing part of the same thing. All the pictures related to each other. It would be more of a study of the subject matter than just a single photograph, and, for photographers like me who really got going when digital photography was taking off and who never worked with square formats in their composition, a real challenge.

Here is my first attempt at what I am talking about:







Another new direction?

Some frustration is coming out here I feel.

I have been hosting my photos all over the place since I got back into photography in 2007.

I have tried flickr, and still have a pro account with them even though I am not a huge fan of the way the webpage displays work - I mainly use it as a way of keeping in touch with a few nice people that I have met. I find the "white" background and no options to be limiting and not flattering for picture display. White is great for text, but not so much for pictures. Very very few of my pictures are there.

I have tried smugmug, and while I liked it, I found that after a year of using it that it was a bit too cartoony for my liking. I prefer something a little less flashy. So I left them. This is a personal preference thing and not a reflection on the service or its stability with which I never once had a problem. It is a question of the style sheets and interface more than anything. I don't have the time to devote to writing my own, and while they support that (if memory serves me correctly) I don't have the interest in learning how to create one of my own which suits me better. Also, I found that virtually no one found my pictures and looked at them while they were hosted on smugmug. I don't really care if anyone comments, but there is, in my view, very little sense in taking a lot of pictures and sharing them with people if no one looks at them. Granted, I am not the world's best photographer or self publicist (not by a long shot), but the baked in community on smugmug seemed somewhat lacking. At least for me.

Which brings me to pbase. The community is great, the service is great (customer service, when I have needed it has been first rate), and the options for photo display are nice and streamlined (if limited) and suit what I am displaying very well. There is an active group of photographers who are highly talented, who produce work on a regular basis, share it, and visit other people's work. I cannot say enough good things about the community. However, the site is not always stable. And that frustrates. Frustrates to the point where I am considering completely changing the way I share photography with the world.

The solution I have come up with goes something like this. Host the best of my photographic work on a webpage which is stable, suits the kind of work I am displaying, and is very slick in its operation. The rest of what I want to share I can do via blogger here along with stories to go along with it.