harry harris' photostream  

Balding camera nut.

Taken, nobody knows why!



Here are my most 'interesting' photos on black (warning, the site loads my 30 most interesting!

audioscrobbler/last.fm most iterated artists.. yup, no taste..


Notes on my current Flickr approach
Like most people, and indeed most social networks, I've found that you start with a small commitment, let it grow until it's unmanageable, then draw back until you reach comfort levels.
I have had to abandon several of my initial approaches to do this, as a result these are my current Flickr maxims:

Priorities
• I prioritise putting photos into my stream first (that's why I paid for a Pro account after all).
• I prioritise commenting on my contacts' photos second.
• I prioritise thanking people for commenting on my photos third (sorry, but the other two are just higher is all).
• As last priority, I monitor the Groups I'm admin on. They don't need much as they're small, and it's often just pool cleaning which is frustrating as people do just drop and run sometimes.

Contacts
Please feel free to make me a contact; but at the moment I am not usually returning the compliment. I have ended up with a lot of contacts that way, and already feel guilty that I don't see their streams often enough!

Groups and Invitations
The current stage of evolution of Flickr Groups leaves me cold. Far too many of them are vehicles for the Admin's considerable egos, with their attention-grabbing (even animated!) logos. And what is it with these comments that tell me I've been granted a place in a Group? That I've won an award? It's the Flickr equivalent of spam. Please do not enourage this behaviour - Groups should serve photographers, not the other way around. I will also not post photos to a Group where I have to fav other photographs (ie, whether I like any of them or not). It's getting very silly.

Time, time, time..
It is clear that different people have very different amounts of time to give to something like Flickr. This varies far more than photographic skill does, I think.

Personal approach to photography
I used to use a pocket digital camera (Pana FX01) most of the time, however I dropped it in a pint of Pitfield 1850 Porter at the 2007 Norwich Beer Festival and it hasn't been the same since.. I did strip and clean it, but after that it was a right nuisance to even start up, so I became the proud owner of a Ricoh R6. It was a good workhorse, with some nifty features like interval timing. While the FX01 was in rehab I did carry around my Ricoh R1 (35mm), it gives stunning pics but I can't deny that it's a bit too big for a trouser pocket, and waiting for a film to finish and then developing, and then scanning.. painful. I've got the Epson 4990 scanner working now, but it's a steep learning curve that I wasn't prepared for. Hence my very low output in November/December 07. Now shooting with positive (slide) film as that seems to scan much better. I also use an XA, and an XA2. They're really too big (thick) for pockets but I do love them! For non-pocket work I used a Pana FZ20 (digital with great lens), and several film cameras (the above, plus an Yash Electro 35, a Bessa-L with the 15/4.5 Heliar and 28/1.9 Ultron, and a Canon EOS 300). The Ricoh R6 fell to dust spotitis, I stripped and cleaned it but to no avail. So I decided to go for a high-end compact instead of middle-of-the-range ones, and bought a Panasonic LX3. It's just fantastic. Not much of a zoom, but great quality, and features you only used to see on DSLRs (film types, for heaven's sakes). It also has a real lens cap, so no-more-dust! I donated the FZ-20 to our friends' son, who's making good use of it - all my digital shooting in with the LX3 now. Of course, the Olmpus E-P1 has just been released (July 2009), and if I had £850.. *sigh*

As for mods, my policy is either to clean up (Noise Ninja) and adjust (levels, etc) until it represents what I saw, or to go wild and reinterpret the thing completely. I'm not into editing out bits that look wrong. I use GraphicConverter, and don't have (or particularly want) Photoshop.