A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Stream
Some other stuff ...
On This Day
Webring
What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my photographs, why I take them, why and where I share them, and how to do that from now on.
One trigger has been Instagram’s slow slide into irrelevance. I regularly miss photos from the people I follow, and vice versa, plus if I want to explore beyond the people I already follow the barrage of crap is overwhelming.
The ease of Instagram, however, alienated me from Flickr, which I used to really enjoy both for the quality of the comments and wandering into new groups with some great images. And Flickr, in its turn, made it easy to abandon the several efforts I put into hosting my own photo galleries on my own website and, indeed, to keeping my own copies of photos.
Another trigger was the realisation that I have let myself get lazy. I used to love going out with a real camera and looking for things to photograph. Now, too much of the time, I have only my phone and just point and shoot. Last December I bought myself a second-hand Sony Cybershot RX100 III in order to carry something competent and less bulky than my main camera, and although that has invigorated my picture taking, it has of course made sharing harder because it is harder. I would like to bring more intentionality back into photography as well as to publishing the images.
Which addresses why I take pictures. Sometimes, often, it is a simple aide-memoire. Sometimes, not often enough, it is a deliberate attempt to create an image that repays looking at. And I share both because I am proud of an image and because I am looking for affirmation, though not necessarily both at the same time.
At present some posts here are illustrated with photos and some are specifically photo posts. I would like to extend that, and it seems obvious now that a static site purely for images is the way to go. With IndieWeb Camp Berlin coming up soon, I’m trying to corral these random swirling thoughts into something specific. To that end, I’ve been reading up about static site generators, notably Eleventy and Hugo, and I think I have settled on Hugo because it seems more approachable to me. It also has a very good-looking portfolio theme that would work more or less out of the box.
photos.jeremycherfas.net or jeremycherfas.net/photosEXIF information as metadataTwo paths beckon.
I have ordered a download of my images from Instagram and will make those the basis of a static reconstruction that I will host.
I will also continue to explore Hugo and maybe take the first tentative steps to implementing a photo portfolio.2
I uploaded my first image to Flickr on 6 March 2005. It was, Flickr tells me, taken on 21 February 2004 with my Olympus C3030Z, a camera I have no memory of. A very quick local search suggests that Flickr holds the only copy of that image. No idea whether that is true for the remaining 1775 items there, but if I am going to be thorough about repatriating my images, I would obviously need to check them all.
For a while, I embedded individual images and whole slideshows from Flickr on my site. Since giving up on that, my site is definitely less visually interesting, even though I have made efforts to use photographs more effectively. I’ve also paid a lot less atention to Flickr, despite coughing up for continuing Pro membership. Just for fun, today, I decided to let Flickr once again email me about interactions and uploads, to see whether that will rekindle my engagement.
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:
Comments
I very much regret that Russian spammers have made my comment system unusable. If you want to email me a comment, it is easy enough to find the address and I will be happy to do the needful behind the scenes. Webmentions remain available (for now).