Yes i have succumbed to the dark side of the force I’m currently trying out Instagram just to see how it fits into my social networking. So far, i’m just feeling my way around the photo sharing service, and it does appear to have noticeable differences from other photography iPhone applications.

To many photographers Instagram and Hipstamatic are dirty words. Dirty, DIRTY words!!! While both of these photography applications are lumped together in criticism, i find they offer the user slightly different approaches to photography using an iPhone. Hipstamatic is far less of a social networking app than Instagram. I can certainly understand Facebook’s interest in purchasing Instagram… though not the price they paid for it.

So will i continue to use it? Well yes. I went out for a walk yesterday and tried to get to grips with what Instagram can do. Sadly i couldn’t upload any over a phone signal as i went along.. because there was NO phone signal out in the countryside. I did manage to eventually upload some images though by using a hotel’s free wi-fi signal.

As a device for visually showing what i’m up to, Instagram is perfect. It’s a visual tweet, a snapshot, a visual scrapbook – a moment in time. The here and now. I just need to settle in with it.

The main website has a Instagram gallery where you’ll be able to see new and old images at http://www.richardflintphoto.com/instagram-gallery/

Earlier this month i mentioned that i would be photographing the Mayday events taking place in an English village. I’m glad to say that i did manage to cover the maypole dancing that day even though the weather forecast was less than encouraging.

Twelve people dancing around a Maypole doesn’t sound too difficult to photograph, and most of the time it isn’t, but it does offer the photographer a slight challenge. The weather didn’t help either with dark clouds threatening to soak everyone. Fortunately the rain did not appear and the dark clouds did make a dramatic backdrop to some of the images.

Traditional dancing is a popular spectator event, but it seems that the numbers of people wanting to take part in the dancing itself are dropping. Several local groups are finding it hard to gain new members – one local Morris dancing group closed due to older members retiring and a lack of new recruits joining. Many other groups may meet the same fate.

Even the garland dancers featured in the gallery photographs are finding recruiting very hard. It may be the case that in a number of years, events like this just won’t take place. Once these traditional dance groups go, it will be incredibly difficult to start them up again. Sadly there just doesn’t seem to be the interest in carrying on many of the rural traditions.

I will be photographing the event next year as well as part of a multimedia piece. I’d like to capture the sounds and atmosphere along with the images before they possibly disappear forever. Hopefully I’ll get better light to shoot with too.

More images can be seen at http://www.richardflintphoto.com/portfolio/maypole/

I thought i’d give a glimpse of something I’m working on at the moment. It’s coming to the time of year when people get dressed up and dance around a brightly coloured pole – a Maypole. It’s usually a very popular event and hopefully there will be some acceptable British bank holiday weather – a tall order i know but it could happen!

Next Monday i’ll going along to the Mayday celebrations to photograph the festivities and try and capture some of the atmosphere. The Maypole featured in the photo above is a permanent iconic structure on the local village green, unlike many other village Maypoles that are put up and taken down when required. Most of the year it just stands waiting, waiting patiently for May to arrive when it will become the focus of attention.

The history of the Maypole is fascinating with the practice falling in and out of favour with the ‘authorities’ on many occasions. Probably one of the more amusing descriptions comes from the Long Parliament ordinance of 1644 describing maypoles as “a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness.” Plenty to photograph then!

It’s old world clashing into the new, although it could be strongly argued that most village Maypole usage these days has more to do with tourism than any olde world beliefs. One visitor to the local celebrations where i am, is apparently coming all the way from Atlanta!

Look out for a Maypole gallery coming to  the main photography website soon

Giving directions – along the sea front near the pier in Cromer, Norfolk, UK

Seagulls riding the Updraft – Sheringham, Norfolk, UK

It all started with a WordPress TV video that dealt with everything you want to know about website security – any website, not just WordPress powered ones. It’s a recommended watch and can be found here.

The security service i’ve started using is called Cloudflare, mentioned briefly in the WordPress TV video. I’m not going to try and explain how Cloudflare works here – they have a nifty video on their homepage that does all that. All i will say is so far it seems a great service, you will protect your website from threats, it’s easy to set up… and it’s free too. All you need is a website with its own domain name.

Cloudflare can be found at www.cloudflare.com 

The last couple of days have been among of the most painful I’ve ever experienced. Strangely, Grandma’s funeral last Thursday wasn’t the worst part – the emptying of the bungalow she called home the following day takes that honour. Something felt very wrong. It was all very surreal and immensely sad as the furniture was carried away. One of the more common sentiments among many of the village residents present at the funeral and afterwards, was that it was the end of an era for the village community. It certainly felt like the end of something you never thought would end.

I had packed a couple of cameras with me and i’m glad i had them. The day of the funeral started as a bright but foggy morning – perfect for getting some moody, atmospheric shots among the trees and around Thorpe Malsor. To be honest, it was great to have a distraction, but the photography also served a deeper purpose of recording the village that had been part of Flint family life for so long. That relationship, that physical connection, has finally gone. Was the photography a form of therapy? Undoubtedly i’d have to say yes.

I took film cameras rather than the DSLR. I did pack the digital camera but then decided to stick with a 35mm SLR and the 6×6. Later it seemed right to be shooting these final (?) images of the village using film. After all, as a teenager, I’d had great fun going around Thorpe looking for images, armed with my trusty Miranda MS2 (my first SLR camera) loaded with Boots film. Fortunately the light was great during my final stay. I’ll be publishing the 35mm and 6×6 images on the blog very soon.

Finally i come to the image above. My iPhone developed major battery problems so that it could only be used if plugged into a power socket. I would have liked to have posted some images, audioboos and tweeted more as i walked around, but it wasn’t to be. Instead i took this image, using my Nokia, of the snowdrops in the churchyard at Thorpe Malsor. For many years, my Grandparents lived in the house opposite. The proximity of the church, combined with living in a fabulous old country house, made it feel very olde world England. The snowdrops in the photo add a feeling of new life. Renewal. A new start.

It was dark when i left the village. Will i return? Well i prefer to use an au revoir rather than a definite goodbye. If I’m nearby, I’ll stop to remember some childhood memories. When it comes down to it though, the Thorpe Malsor residents were right – it is the end of an era.

No it isn’t a great image, and no i’m not becoming one of those ‘visual artists’ who use images from Google Street to make art. This screen capture image, though fuzzy and blurry, is an important find…. at least to some people.

Last weekend, the last in the line of my grandparents died. My Grandma was 93. The family is still coming to terms with the events of the past ten days. Somehow you believe that people will always be there. We fool ourselves into thinking that time stands still when everything, in fact, points to time passing by and people getting older. Then you get hit with the fact that connections to people and places do come to an abrupt end.

Next week I’ll be down in Northamptonshire for the funeral and to empty Grandma’s bungalow. It will be a sad event in more ways than one. We will have also lost the last  family connection to the village of Thorpe Malsor where my father spent much of his childhood and my grandparents lived right until the end. The village itself was part of the family with so many memories. It was the place where i first got drunk on a rather tasty, but very powerful, home made rhubarb whiskey from my Granddad’s extensive wine cellar. You name it, and my Granddad had probably made a very good wine from it. It’s going to be sad to think that we have no one to visit there any more.

While having a wander through Thorpe Malsor on Google Earth today, I suddenly came across this familiar looking person walking their dog. Was it? Is it? Yes! It is my Grandma walking Trixie. I actually recognised Trixie first – no face blurring on dogs. Grandma seems to be just turning the corner for home after returning from a walk down Eagle Lane. They used to walk miles. The image was taken nearly three years ago, back in March 2009.

I imagine she had no idea what the Google Street car was, or what it was doing. Trixie is certainly giving the camera a wary look I had no idea Grandma was on Google Earth until today, but it’s certainly a nice way to remember her – just out walking Trixie.

I’m currently reinstalling everything back onto my laptop. Great fun! After around 18 months of flawless use, the laptop finally started freezing on me in critical situations, so i decided to do a factory reset. A drastic move, i know, but it means a fresh, clean laptop ready to go soon. It’ll just take me several days to put all the software back on it.

Fortunately there was nothing on the hard drive of great value. I backup to DVD-ROM and memory stick, and now DropBox, as often as i can, but it never seems quite enough. The fear of losing digital content has increased each year as i realise how much I rely on files just being there. To complicate matters, the laptop DVD-RW would no longer burn discs due to a software issue. The factory reset has removed this problem too. Phew!

Just recently I started using an online service called CodeGuard after i realised how much blood, sweat, tears and man hours had gone into the main website redesign. The idea of someone wrecking all that work with a hack [shiver] terrified me! CodeGuard simply backup your website (all the files on your server) so you have a fall-back (or several!) should the worse happen. So far it looks like a great service.

It’s not been a bad start to 2012 on the website front, so i thought i’d do a little roundup of the highlights.

The new RichFlintPhoto | 50mm Tumblr blog is set to stay, and i may even invest in a better theme for the site later this year. It difficult to describe the difference between a Tumblr blog and the WordPress/Blogger, so lets just say it’s a nice, quick, daily updated addition to the blog family. Check out 50mm on Tumblr at http://richflintphoto.tumblr.com/

I also invested a little more time in my main blog including a review post of the content and publication application SlideShowPro Director. I haven’t done a review on the blog for some time – years probably – but i was so impressed with the SlideShowPro software that i thought i HAD to do a review. No sponsored review – i bought the software with my own money – just a simple review of what SlideShowPro Director offers.

If you are waiting for the release of the well overdue podcast, then you’ll be glad to know that I’ll be recording it over the next couple of days. It should have been released (or do they escape?) by now, but a sound card failure delayed the recording. I really do need to get some kit to make it slightly easier to record i.e USB microphone. Expect the extended December/January photography podcast with news and links very soon.

OK, OK, I admit it. I severely underestimated the amount of work needed putting together the Norfolk project book. This week i added more images to the gallery for the project on my website, and it suddenly dawned on me the task that lay ahead. It’s pretty damn big.

I want to do a good job on this book. No, actually i want to do a fantastic job on this book, and it seems only right for me to take my time doing it. I have hundreds of images to go through, and i have to choose a total of 100 for the book. I can’t really do that without having some idea of what i’ve actually got. The images i’ve shown so far are just a fraction of what i shot. I haven’t really gone through the work in detail, apart from the occasional quick scan through the negatives and digital image files. I really need to collate all the work. I thought i could do it all in 3 months. Ha!

With that in mind,  i’ve decided to delay the release of the Norfolk project book until early 2013. It will give me this year to thoroughly go through the work and see everything, every last bit of the project. It seems pointless to rush the book, and I already have a book planned for later this year with images of Scotland, so i will produce a book in 2012.

I’m looking forward to exploring and producing images in an area of the UK i’ve never been to before. Scotland looks fabulous. I’ve already started using the impressive power of Google Earth to help me spot the best shooting viewpoints, check out the surrounding area and plan what images i want to take.

“Some pros are dabbling with digital but most still shoot on film“. A remarkable claim by the great Eamonn McCabe made on BBC Radio 4 recently. I’ve been a fan of McCabe’s work ever since i first saw his sports photography in a copy of amateur photographer around 20+ years ago. In this case though, Eamonn seems to have got it rather wrong.

The problem is, is that photographers tend to believe that everyone works like they do – I shoot mostly on film, so therefore everyone else does. Only they don’t! Photography is a fascinating business because it is made up of so many practitioners doing photography their own way. We customise it to our own way of seeing, thinking and our attitudes to the world. We build our own methods, philosophies and believes, creating our own view of photography – and then we guard it fiercely. I’m right, you’re wrong!

For my part, I shoot digitally and on film. I love both and always will, but i am aware that there are photographers, out in this big bad world of ours, who will NEVER touch a film camera ever again. Likewise, some photographers stay away from digital photography. That’s a decision that they’ve made, just like i made a decision to use both digital and film. That’s the beauty of photography – we mould it into what we want, and no mould is exactly the same.

Yes! Yesterday, the final galleries of the portfolio were converted over to the SlideShowPro system and the WordPress gallery plugin I’d been using was deleted. I finally got rid of what i regarded as the weak link in the chain from the website.

The gallery plugin hadn’t been updated for over a year, with the developer just abandoning his creation – no word, no improvements, nothing! I just knew that eventually i would update WordPress and find that the galleries no longer functioned. Sadly, the options available in the plugin repository were rather lacking in features, and so i ended up looking for alternatives outside of the WordPress system.

So what now? There is plenty left to do, with the work now focussed around the editing of gallery images and uploading them the website.  I am, for once, ahead of schedule  - the complete conversion to SlideShowPro was pencilled in for completion by the end of January – any further developments this month will be an added bonus.

In the news with have the launch of the Nikon D4 and the rumbles of what looks like the end of that once mighty photo leviathan called Kodak. Both stories reflect how quickly the photo industry can change, It wasn’t that long ago that Nikon was seen as lagging some way behind Canon in the digital technology stakes. Now Nikon seem to have the edge.

Kodak’s demise is sad though. I’ve never been a huge user of Kodak products, but for a time i was a dedicated fan of their TMAX range of products – i still (though for how much longer is anyone’s guess) use their TMAX developer. I certainly won’t shrug off the demise of a company that has helped me take photographs over the years. Some others seem less bothered. Photography, for me at least, does not just mean digital imaging.

One of the more popular photography blogs had a post that enthused about the ‘end of the film age‘. Personally i believe that film will last for some time to come, but like in many industry sectors, only a small number of film manufacturing companies will survive or remain in that sector. In the film sector, companies like Fuji and Ilford may remain the only big players, especially if Kodak does go down. I do hope that film remains available. Film offers the user a different picture taking experience to digital. That should be encouraged. If the Impossible Project can make Polaroid film sales viable – surely 35mm, 120 and 5×4 film can have a place too.

Final thought: The decline of our high street photography shops can be linked to online competition, but a massive factor was the switch to digital. The market for photographic materials just vanished. After buying a camera and a memory card, why go back to the store? A lens? A bag maybe. Not regular items you’d go and purchase often though.

Digital changed the business model for the camera store on the high street, as much as it changed the photography industry itself. We have gained much from the digital imaging revolution, but that gain comes at a price. Those that can’t keep up will fall. Kodak, sadly appears to be one of those falling.

I’ve decided to start something new for 2012 and it comes in the shape of a Tumblr blog called 50mm. Unlike my other wondrous blog creations, Tumblr will feature quick, short, daily posts of images, audio, video and text. AudioBoo links in too.

So it’s short and simple posts full of photography miscellanea as i call it. It is experimental, so it won’t be linked into Twitter just yet, but it should be fun to have a play around with.

You can visit my little 2012 experiment at richflintphoto.tumblr.com

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 18 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.