Someone on Flickr quoting Martin Parr on Flickr - he’s quite right, of course… there is a huge compulsion to conform to what will make an image that will be popular on Flickr. I do it all the time. So hard to be original and find your own style.
I also would say that a lot of the work on Flickr is generic. It looks quite modern, because you lot are aware of trends and the language of contemporary photography… But I cannot recall seeing a set of work that would make a stunning book.
Before you all bite my head off and tell me that you are all geniuses, you have to remember that there are over 1000 books of new work published every year and most of these tend to disappear after publication.The quality of this published work is high, but it is difficult to achieve the uniqueness that will assure you of a place in photo history.
It is a tough world out there, and I think that Flickr has a great contribution to make, but still feel it is unlikely that the next big photo star will come from this source.
The new video feature on Flickr has - predictably - caused a small storm with thousands of users joining a group calling for video to be removed from the site; these are Flickr purists who think the site should just be about the majesty of the still image.
But Flickr’s video is no YouTube - you’re limited to 90 seconds for one thing, which really does make it a forum for small movies that are probably - in effect - animated still images. Like Martin Parr’s BBC film of people’s houses. You’re unlikely to find TV shows or movies in 90 second chunks.
Another ‘damn, if only I’d remembered my camera’ moment this morning. On the train, sitting in front of me, diagonally across the aisle, her back to me. She is copying a speech out of a book of audition pieces into a little blue notebook. Her handwriting is of the variety that looks like it should have circles or hearts for dots on the letter ‘i’s and ‘j’s - but doesn’t. Her long blonde hair is flowing over her pale, long coat. She is wearing pinstripe trousers and leopard-skin pumps. You cannot see her face at all.
The Asus eeePC is great for the photographer on the hoof - especially if your camera uses SD cards which you can just pop in the slot in the side. The default image viewers are okay but leave a bit to be desired if you want to do anything slightly unusual… I tried a couple of others such as Google’s Picassa and Digikam but they weren’t quite for me either… specifically I wanted to be able to crop images to a fixed aspect ratio for making wallpaper. I was pretty sure that The Gimp would do the trick - using it is easy for anyone familiar with Photoshop. I had a look at this interesting post on eeePC tools for photographers - worth noting that to install it I had to press ctrl-alt-T to get a terminal and then type sudo apt-get update
(note ’sudo’) and sudo apt-get install gimp to get the install to work. (Thanks to Eric for pointing out my error here, now corrected).
When running the Gimp for the first time (type ‘gimp’ at the command line) the install wizard buttons will be off the screen, so hold down the alt key and click and drag the window up to get at them. You can use this trick to make sense out of the crowded Gimp screen too!
There was also a nice supplement on photography in The Guardian today - including an article by Parr. The opening paragraph is great, confirms why I rate him so much - and seems to chime with my notion that in photography as in many things, it’s a bad workman who blames his tools:
Modern technology has taken the angst out of taking the perfect shot. For me, the only thing that counts is the idea behind the image: what you want to see and what you want to say. The idea is crucial.
That and the bit on the BBC web site where it describes how Martin Parr only got into Magnum by a single vote and how much some other Magnum photographers hate him.
Like a lot of people on Flickr I made Dave Gorman a contact when I spotted him on there. I liked his pictures and I liked his stuff on the telly, so why not?
Then a few weeks ago a friend posted a comment on one Dave’s pictures. The gist was that the picture was okay but he didn’t think it would have garnered such a large number of favourable comments if Dave wasn’t famous.
Dave Gorman removed the comment, but wrote a polite note explaining why he’d removed it.
Last week I spotted this Dave Gorman photo on a Flickr group for objects that look like faces. It looked remarkably similar to this one I took - and posted to the same group - a few weeks before:
Now I know that my photo is technically inferior - a bit blurred and taken with a cheap compact camera. But I think it’s a better photo because of the group thing. I think it’s funnier. But of course Dave has many more positive comments and favourites than me - only to be expected as he has so many contacts.
I posted a link to my photo on his with the simple message ’snap!’. There, that’ll show ‘em I thought. But since then FOUR more people have commented on how great Dave’s picture is…
This morning in Manor Lane, Lewisham. White van emblazoned with the ‘Geographers A-Z Map Company’ logo. Driver parked at angle on side of road, utterly lost, consulting huge A-Z road atlas.
Being a bit spoilt at the moment… an 
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