Darkroom Daze's photostream  

[Last revised October 30th 2011]

I use photography and Flickr as a photo-blog and photo-diary, especially for hobbies, work interests, travel trips, family and other events. When I travel, I use photography for many of these things at once. I also like to record everyday things, fleeting impressions, and happenings, taken on whim. I look for interesting patterns, moments, scenes, shapes, contrasts and quirky situations, but don't mind capturing the mundane either. I'm often happy to just point and click. No, I don't think of it as art. It's more about the record, and just helping the subjects speak for themselves.

DARKROOM DAYS
I started photography as a pre-teen, with simple film cameras including an Agfa bellows camera, and later a Kodak Retinette. I learnt to do my own darkroom processing and progressed to SLRs - Exacta then Nikon. I then switched to colour film and lab-processing. The bulk of my pictures are still on film and print so at some point I'll have to scan at least some of them. Right now, only a very few of my present pictures consist of scans from my older photo stock.

DIGITAL DAYS
I only recently moved to digital photography and started with a good quality Casio compact in order to learn the basics. I love the scope this gives for spontaneity (I carry my compact with me all the time, in my pocket or bag), for editing, and for sharing the results with friends, family and work colleagues. In October 2009 I added a Nikon SLR digital camera too. Since March 2011 I have also used my iPhone for quick snaps.

EDITING
I do only a small amount of editing, mostly for things like cropping, straightening, sharpness, red eye and colour balance. I have an excellent large Apple matt screen and use iPhoto, sometimes with a second edit using Picnik after uploading to Flickr. Since I'm mostly only trying to record things as I find them, I'm happy to keep an edited shot reasonably true to its 'raw' form, and in some cases, I may not edit at all. I guess this has something to do with having spent so long doing film photography.

ON FLICKR
My PHOTOSTREAM is pretty random because I tend to upload from my photo stock in no particular thematic order or time-sequence, apart from upload an event series together. Also, my photostream is now too long to find particular subjects quickly. However, I do also put my photos into COLLECTIONS or SETS as I upload them, and have also been TAGGING and GEOTAGGING them (but I do have a backlog of untagged ones). So for anyone viewing my pictures, and looking for a particular subject, I suggest you go straight to my collections and sets and also use Flickr's search options, to find what you want. (Note that Flickr gives the option of going to the relevant set(s) when you view a picture in photostream mode.) Many of my collections and sets are ongoing, not complete, as such.

All photos can be viewed on BLACK BACKGROUND, e.g. in the photostream, click first on the picture to enlarge it, then click on it again. Or use Flickriver or similar.

I set out my DESCRIPTIONS with general information first, followed by more technical information where I can provide this. I particularly do this, together with technical subject tags, mostly for geology, natural history and other special interests, both amateur or professional. I've used first names for family and friends, and fuller names for historical and public figures.

Sometimes I've put the same image into more than one set. However, in Flickr, titles, descriptions, tags etc. for a single upload are 'locked' to that particular uploaded image (i.e. in the Photostream). so it's not possible to change these to suit the placing of a photo in each of its different subject set. Instead, one has to create another version of the same image with a different identification outside Flickr, upload the new version and then give it whatever separate description and other information one needs. I did this a few times when I first started but now prefer to provide all the different relevant information for one single uploaded image.

PERSONAL
I'm not as young as I think I am. I'm married. I'm sociable. I have three adult sons, one adult daughter and a granddaughter. Professionally, I'm qualified in geology and marine biology. I've worked as a research scientist in the earth and life sciences with particular interests in living and fossil corals and reefs, regional geology, sedimentology, biogeography, growth and form, ecology, landscape and general natural history, also history of science and scientists, particularly in relation to these fields. I also have many other non-professional interests including music, travel, railways, languages, gardens and of course photography. I live in an area of south London with plenty of open spaces, but I really like to get out of London especially to mountains and coasts, and to travel generally, whenever possible.

ATTRIBUTIONS AND PERMISSIONS
The default permissions setting for my photos is the CREATIVE COMMONS category: ATTRIBUTION NON-COMMERCIAL SHARE ALIKE. So if you wish to use any of my photos on my Flickr pages non-commercially, please attribute using my screen-name or personal name, with a link back to my Flickr pages. If you want to use them commercially, please contact me. Some of the photos on my Flickr pages are by other people, either on my own camera or on theirs, and in these cases my default setting is NONE - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, with attribution, copyright statement and a link as applicable. Scanned photos from our inherited family archive were mostly taken by numerous other people, many of whose identities we don't know.