my name is mwd

Busted out my DSLR for the first time in a while yesterday. Took this photo, which is just muscle memory I suspect:

It was interesting to realise it’s not just myself that’s rusty when it comes to photographs, but also the way I process and distribute them is also quite rusty. Aperture, which Apple have already signalled isn’t long for this world, is already showing some obvious bugs when run under Yosemite, and Flickr, where I used to post photos, is in quite a sad state. The photo presentation formatting has changed considerably, which makes a mess of the framing on my old photos which was designed around Flickr’s old layout. Even worse, my attempt to log in was pretty much a full screen advert for some bank with a tiny login to one side, and given I pay for Flickr, I strongly object to this. I suspect I’ll be closing my Flickr account shortly, which is sad, as Flickr used to have a very good community.

Discussing with a friend, it looks like there’s no go to place for photos on the internet any more, at least for serious amateurs like ourselves. Flickr is now a mess, 500px never really seemed to take off, SmugMug’s layout never really suited trying to present photos such that they’re not surrounded by widgets. My friend has taken to just using his blog, and here I am doing the same, but then I miss the feedback from other photographers, which really helped me a lot during my 365.

This all ties back a bit to a common discussion at the Indie tech summit I went to earlier this year. A common theme there was trying to find a home for your content on the web, such that you could put it where others could access it (which mainly means with shared services), whilst at the same time you regain control over it (which mainly means with self owned services). There was some good ideas floating around, but it’ll be interesting to see if any of those make it to launch, and if they do, then whether they can succeed where services like identi.ca and diaspora failed.

Update 18th Sept 2022: As is befitting of this post, I’ve just had to fix the image here, as it was originally hosted on 500px, a service to which I no longer subscribe. Thankfully, for now at least, this blog has become a primary source for my photos, and thus I hope won’t go missing again for a while.