Settling Dust

February 28th marked the fourth birthday of this very blog which, i must admit, fills me with both a feeling of pride and regret. The blog has suffered from neglect over the last few months. Yes, neglect is the right word to use, as events, places and people have got in the way, however that is about to change.

Tomorrow i will start posting regularly again and in a month's time the photographer profile series will start again with the photographer Lee Miller. For those of you subscribed to the podcast, I'll be recording the February edition tomorrow and i have some brilliant website links for you.

Until tomorrow...

Green to Go

Good news! After a mighty effort to get the main website back online, the hard work has finally paid off. The site went live online, after a few technical issues, via its new hosting home on Wednesday night. 

The website works and looks great, the business E-mail addresses are working again and the lesson has been learned that these days we should take NOTHING for granted - especially when it comes to regarding our website hosting arrangements. 

Anyway we are green to go. All i can say is phew... what a relief! 

Website Down

Yesterday saw the demise of my website. At around 1pm the site lights went out only to return some five hours later for another two hours before finally sinking. It looks like the hosting company i'm with, Web-Mania, have finally succumbed to the current tough economic situation. There was no indication of any problem until yesterday,and in the five years of using the hosting service i only ever encountered one issue.

So it's hosting hunting for me. For the next few days at least, all of my links will point to my Facebook page. I'm currently looking around to see what's on offer. Backups of the new website were made quickly when the website reappeared last night. As one of my Twitter followers rightly commented, I was the 'luckiest photographer in the UK'. Maybe, but i don't feel lucky.

Ready, Steady....GO!

Speedway start at Wolverhampton, 1997

Speedway. Powerful motorbikes with no brakes. Just awesome.... and the sound was just out of this world too. A roar would be the best description. I'm still going through work for the portfolio and this project is definitely staying in.

It's not a sport flush with money, unlike many others, but all involved, from the teams right through to the fans, have a passion for Speedway. I might have another go at photographing a team this year.

Original Edit

Helicopter coming into land: Army exercise near Stone, Staffordshire, UK

Work on the new portfolio galleries continues at pace. With the amount of work that i have to add, it looks like it'll be quite a few weeks before the portfolio is fully up to strength. Digitally shot work isn't too much of a hassle but images captured on film requires a lot of effort.  Lots of scanning is involved and that takes time. Re-visiting projects does have it's advantages though. Several of the galleries will be extended to include new photographs taken during those shoots. An extended director's cut version, if you will.

One such gallery is the Territorial Army. Originally  this gallery had around twenty five images, but this will increase to around forty in the new portfolio. So where are these new extra images coming from? Quite simply, they are just shots that were edited out due to time, darkroom printing and photo-story narrative issues. I really have been surprised how many great photographs did not make the original final edit. Obviously some other considerations came into play at the time.

Lebanon's Missing

Found via the most excellent duckrabbit blog.

Just Browsing

2011 has started with a flurry of activity altering websites. If you visited the main website recently, you will have noticed that it has a brand new design. The work is, by no means, finished. There are plenty of bugs, design elements and additional pages to sort out, but I'm slowly getting there. Simplicity has been the keyword. Several pages have been combined, so for example, the podcast page now has the main podcast and the audioBoos together. The digital image services (Image repair, manipulation and copying) will also be placed on just one page from now under the (working) title of  Photoshop services.

One problem I have run into has been to do with web browsers. Wow, what a choice we have these days. For many years, I exclusively used Microsoft's Internet Explorer as really there were no other options available. Now I'm using Firefox and Google Chrome more and more. I have five browsers on my laptop - Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. My reasons for having five browsers on my computer are many, but it comes down to choice and checking website compatibility. I also like the speed and intuitive design of browsers like Google Chrome.

While developing my website's new portfolio section, I've come across the fact that all of the main browsers work with my new Wordpress plugin flash gallery EXCEPT Internet Explorer. For some reason the gallery images and links do not work in Microsoft's popular browser. My only conclusion is that Microsoft are lagging behind in developing their browser and keeping it up-to-date.This is a potential problem, although not one big enough for me to scrap the development of the gallery. I need the gallery to be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, to view on as many ranges of systems and set-ups as possible - not easy to accomplish at all. In my portfolio's case, I believe that Internet Explorer needs to catch up with its rival browsers. It seems odd that the others work perfectly well, but Microsoft's does not.

If you haven't tried another Internet browser other that Microsoft's, then I'd have a look at some of the others available. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Two Shots

The first post of 2011... and I'm starting with a short film that has managed to wind me up no end.

I'll let you make your own mind up about the photographer character in this short film, but i will just add that i don't think the film is clear cut enough in it's depiction of the moral issues of reporting a war. Quite honestly, I don't like the female photojournalist character one little bit. She seems to possess all the qualities that i think a photojournalist shouldn't have! The film did remind me though of a story I once read.

The former BBC reporter Martin Bell writes in his 1995 autobiography 'In Harm's Way' about the moral implications of covering stories in a war zone. Bell had covered stories in war zones from Vietnam to Bosnia and his book dealt extensively with his experiences of reporting from war torn Bosnia and Croatia during the 1990's. He writes about the following anecdote that could be apocryphal but probably isn't.

The story concerns a journalist who want to write a profile about a sniper in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the 1990's. The sniper is looking down on a street. 'What do you see'? asks the journalist. 'I see two people walking in the street' replies the sniper, 'Which of them do you want me to shoot'? It's at this point that the journalist realizes he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, engaged on a story that is fatally flawed and one he should have never considered.

The journalist urges the sniper not to shoot and turns to leave. At that same moment two shots ring out. 'That was a pity' says the sniper 'You could have saved one of their lives'.