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Where has all the Google Love gone?

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:05:00 +1100

If you're a Google Plus user who likes to create and share content, what do you think is the best thing about sharing on Google Plus?

My circle of contacts is heavy with photographers and artists and those I interact with the most say it's the level of engagement from other users that makes G+ such a great experience. I've seen many gushing reports of the amazing response users get to their content on G+ compared to the same content when posted on Facebook and Flickr.

One of the most active and most followed photographers in G+ is my Flickr mate, Thomas Hawk. TH is also one of G+'s most vocal advocates. Soon after joining G+ Thomas wrote:

"My photos posted to Google+ receive far more attention than posting them to any other social network."

And he later added:

"Photos on Google+ get way more engagement and interaction, for the photographers that put the effort in. Almost every photographer who has put the effort in at G+ has gotten way more engagement than any other site. I’ve never seen anything like the engagement photos get on G+ — new photographers and popular photographers alike."

If you were looking for a place to show of your work and engage with your audience this makes a compelling argument to get on the Google Plus bandwagon. It was a sentiment shared by the very popular photographer, Trey Ratcliff who said in July:

"Less than 12 hours ago, I exclusively put up a new photo of Paris, and the level of engagement has been 100x higher than anything on Facebook."

The indefatigable, inimitable Robert Scoble has been equally as positive about the unmatched level of engagement on G+:

"Why am I a Google+ Fan? Well, let's look. I posted a link to my blog about Facebook's new features at 11 a.m. on both Facebook and Google+.
What's the results?
On Google+ I got 46 + 1's. 84 shares. 100 comments. So far.
On Facebook I got six likes. So far. NO comments.
On Twitter I got 11 retweets. So far. Very few comments back other than "nice post."
Says it all, really."

My experience has been much the same but at a more pedestrian level than these guys who have close to 2 million followers between them (I just know that number will look ridiculously small in just a few months!). I've been buoyed by the Google Love just like they have and the level of interest my photography has enjoyed in G+ would never have happened elsewhere.

But it seems the honeymoon might be coming to an end. All parties have moved to their respective ends of the couch and appear to have stopped noticing one another.

In the heady early days of G+ (yes, yes, these are the early days, but I'm talking about the really early days) there was a palpable level of what seemed genuine interest in one another's posts as comment after comment, +1 after +1 filled our notification alerts. Many of us switched off Google's notifications because the number of incoming messages was so high. When I told Lotus Carroll back in July that I was still getting email notifications she asked "Are you just about ready to kill yourself when you look at your inbox?" Well, maybe I should have turned off my email notifications but I like the "Bing!" "Bing!" as my messages arrive..... it makes me feel loved :-)

Anyway, back to the jaded married couple on the couch. You see, these days the level of interaction has fallen to such a low level it has become close to zero, for even the most popular Pluskins. Before you guffaw at that ridiculous statement, consider things in their proper context. Back in July last year, for example, Thomas would receive maybe 100 +1s and 30 or so comments on his photo posts and those numbers were exceptional when compared to the response he was getting on Flickr and Facebook. This month he typically receives 400 or more +1s and over 100 comments for every post.

Pretty good, huh? Well, no, in fact. Back in July TH was in around 5,000 circles, today he's in almost 900,000. In real terms Thomas gets a response from almost nobody - 0.04% give him a +1 and 0.0078% leave a comment! That's so close to zero it doesn't matter.

Click on this graph of comments and +1s per post since July last year.

Since we got this thing started, TH's levels of interaction with his audience has dwindled to almost nothing. And he's not on his Pat Malone. The same thing has occurred with Trey Ratcliff and Elena Kalis. I've gone cross-eyed today stalking their streams and counting the number of comments and +1s they've received and graphed that against their increasing number of followers (thanks to socialstatistics.com) and found all three are currently being all but ignored by their audience who are apparently sitting at the opposite end of the couch with their nose in a magazine.

Here is Trey's chart.

And here is Elena's.

Click on them for a better look, they're just like Thomas'. Is it possible our heavyweights have significance due to their huge following but no relevance?

So where did all the Google Love go? It beats the hell out of me but I think it's a phenomenon our Google Overlords had better be thinking about. If the likes of Thomas, Trey and Elena, with all their creativity and high quality content are being more or less ignored by the people who have circled them what hope does Google have of keeping a complete newbie interested? I've made this point before as have many others, but the fact remains Google needs to get our friends and family in here otherwise they may end up with a massive social network filled with hundreds of millions of Pluskins with nothing to say to one another.

Back to the future of photography No.1.

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:47:00 +1100

What will your next camera body be and what features and specifications would you most like? I bet you’d love full frame, 25 megapixel equivalent and 16-bit depth. How about a top shutter speed of 1/8000 of a second and a flash sync at 1/250th?

They’re pretty nice features. I have something for you with all that and more - how about 10 frames per second with no buffering? Yep, no buffering. I know of a body that will shoot continuously at 10 frames per second until you exhaust it’s capacity.

Don’t believe me? Then how about this? I’ll throw in zero mirror vibration and no viewfinder blackout while shooting.

Interested? Well you’re more than 15 years late to the party. This amazing list of features was included in Canon’s EOS-1N RS way back in 1995 and today’s dSLRs are barely matching it.

The RS was a marvelous film body and it was one of Canon’s early models featuring a pellicle mirror which didn’t flip up between exposures and it was a body that pushed all the speed limits. Today’s 5D MkII looks positively glacial by comparison. The 5D has a shutter lag of 0.4 seconds, the RS was 0.006 seconds. The 5D shoots at 3.9 frames per second - in the same second the RS could take more than twice as many exposures. Ever wondered what it would be like to fire a machine gun? Something like shooting an entire 24 exposure roll of film in 2 and a half seconds, I reckon.

Want one? There’s one on eBay right now for $425. The price on release was $5,575.

This is just one of the great finds I rediscovered while looking back through my back issues from 1995 of Better Photography Magazine. I wrote about that great publication here a few weeks back.

Other developments from 1995 included a wonderful new film called XP2 by Ilford. This was the first chromogenic black and white film which meant it could be developed and printed at the local mini-lab where your colour film was processed using the same C41 chemistry. (Anyone younger than 25 probably has no idea what I’m talking about, right? Well, get your parents to tell you about the time it would take a week or more between pressing the shutter button and seeing the picture.) At $9.95 for a 36 exposure roll XP2 was a cheap and high quality way to shoot black and white without needing to invest in a wet darkroom (again, ask your parents!).

Another new product release of note was the Rolleivision Twin MSC 300 P. A twin lens projector that let you dissolve from one slide to the next for a truly professional looking slideshow! It even let you project the slides in any order without having to rearrange them in the magazine. Genius. And only $3,500.

The editor of Better Photographer is Peter Eastway and back in 1995 he was sharing all the pro tips. Peter suggested photographers may be interested in displayng there digitised slides on The World Wide Web. He said “Imagine hundreds of thousands of computers all around the world, all left on. You turn on your computer, dial up a single telephone number and suddenly you have access to all these computers at the same time!” Sounds thrilling, Peter.

He goes on “with the internet you can send your photograph from your computer to another computer in full colour and it could take as little as 20 minutes to send.” Revolutionary.

Peter finished his piece by asking readers to share any locations they’ve found on the World Wide Web that have good photographs on show. He said “in a couple of issues I’ll be brave enough to give you my email address”, until then please write or fax him the details. 0_o

Some things in 1995 were as relevant then as they are today and as the were in 1895. Much of this issue was dedicated to how to be a better photographer. Can you guess what the advice included? Tips on using the direction, warmth and quality of light; how to create a pleasing composition; and creative use of depth of field and shutter speeds. The technology can change, but the ingredients for great photography will always remain the same.

G+ vs Facebook vs Twitter. The numbers don't help.

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:25:00 +1100

Robert Scoble wrote a piece today in response to an article by Richard McManus of Read Write Web.

In that post Robert made some interesting points about why the tech press are quick to criticise engagement levels on Google Plus compared to the two biggest social networks, Facebook and Twitter. McManus bleats about Vic Gondotra refusing to release activity metrics for G+ users and laments that without such numbers no meaningful comparison can be made between it and the others. Robert responds with some discussion about the comparative usage rates and says "I don't think the numbers are all that good if you compare to Twitter or Facebook".

(I should say, Robert went on to make some very salient points about why McManus and his ilk just don't, and maybe won't, get it. And why that really doesn't matter.)

I think Robert and Richard are both mistaken to some degree when they draw any numerical comparison between the three products because each platform is its own thing serving its own market segment. They overlap, of course, but Facebook, Twitter and G+ are very different products that really shouldn't be compared on user numbers and post counts alone because their communities use them for very different purposes.

Facebook's (former) synchronous user relationship model has created a community who interact mostly with people they know outside of Facebook. Before you can interact with another user they have to grant you access to their content and most people will do so only for people they know - yes, not everyone's friends list is created on that basis but the model encourages it to work that way so the majority of people's friends will be known to them.

As a consequence, Facebook users congregate around their relationships.

Twitter, on the other hand, is little more than an echo chamber. As Robert has pointed out, Twitter is not a place for group conversations, it's more like a box to stand on down at Speakers' Corner where everybody's talking and nobody's listening.

Twitter is a megaphone.

Google Plus is a different beast again. Its early adopters and invitees were geeks, photographers and tech evangelists who in turn invited people who share their interests. It may be a little more complex than that, but for whatever reason, Google Plus has become less of a social network and more of a content sharing platform. G+ users congregate not around their pre-existing relationships, but around content and topics. It's used by some people to shout out their current location, or to ask for help with the latest iOS update, but most of the content in people's streams is more thoughtful and creative than that.

Google Plus is not a social network, it's a content sharing platform with a social element.

And this is why Robert to a small degree, and Richard to a much larger degree, are mistaken when they even try to draw comparisons between the three networks based on numbers.

If you follow more than a hundred or so random people on Twitter I challenge you to make any sense of your Twitter stream as the most obscure Tweets fly past containing American Idol votes, radio station competition entries, comments to live TV shows and the odd left-wing extremist political rant.

Facebook's total daily activity contains a lot of very good long-form content, but how much of the total is status updates, birthday party invitations and conversations with your mother?

The G+ community has a very different use for their platform. As I see it, there are content creators and content consumers on G+. The creators are the active minority who share their creations, thoughts and opinions to an audience of both active and passive others. The active ones comment or post their own content in response, while the passive audience just enjoy what comes to them.

The majority of all people worldwide are content consumers, not creators. By extrapolation, the same should apply to the G+ community. Therefore, while McManus is looking for active users, and comparing G+'s number to Facebook or Twitter, he's missing the primary difference between G+ and the others. G+ users may post less, but I'll wager they consume much much more. And that's just fine with Google because they will want to advertise to consumers of content.

Google Plus has yet to realise its potential, it's easy to forget it's only a few months old, but it will eventually settle into its position in the market place alongside Facebook and Twitter. Each platform will provide a different service to overlapping user populations and all three will co-exist.

Until Twitter collapses, but that's another story.

Back to the future of photography No. 0.

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Mon, 5 Sep 2011 13:26:00 +1000

For me, the months of 1996 were marked not by the calendar, but in issues of Better Photography Magazine. I turned 28 that year and had already been a keen photographer for more than a decade, wielding my Hanimex 110 Tele with its 16mm film from about the age of 17 before graduating to a preloved Ricoh XR10 a year or two later.

I lashed out and bought a brand new Pentax MZ-5 SLR when they were released in 1996. I doubt a more beige camera has ever been produced, it was so very ordinary but it was new, it was mine and I loved it. As if to celebrate the arrival of my brand new camera the first edition of Better Photography Magazine also hit the shelves that year. Better Photography was a unique publication in its time, printed on high quality paper and featuring master classes with some of the finest living photographers, it was the top end magazine among all the others offering little more than endless model reviews and rank beginner tutorials..
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My memories of that time are of taking my unopened new edition of Better Photography into a sunny corner of my kitchen where I would sit undisturbed and slowly read from cover to cover. I would marvel at the gorgeous black and white prints in the Darkroom feature with step by step instructions of how each print was produced including copies of test strips, straight prints and working prints, each showing the iterative process of producing the final image. .
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The Masterpieces section would guide you through the story behind the creation of some extraordinary travel or landscape pictures, while the Legends section would feature revealing interviews with great photographers like Thurston Hopkins. The magazine's editor, Peter Eastway, was an equipment snob and still is today. He would love to write about his latest Medium Format SLR body or how dearly he loved his 400mm f2 lens worth more than the car I was driving at the time. .
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I would sit there in my wing chair by the fire and devour every word and drool at every delicious image. For the remainder of the month my evenings would be spent rereading each article, perhaps twice, and my weekends were sacrificed to the time spent putting into practice the lessons from each edition. By the last week of the month I would begin looking out for the next edition to arrive in the mail so I could start the whole process over with fresh inspirations..
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When I moved to a new home a couple of years ago my old collection of Better Photography and National Geographic magazines found their way into the boxes headed for the dump. I had sat on these magazines for too many years and a house move is a great time to be reminded of what a hoarder I am so they got the chop and sat in boxes on the lawn waiting to join the next carload of rubbish. .
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My wife spotted these box loads of magazines and protested that the children might have a use for all the NatGeos for school projects and the like. "Better save the Illustrated Funk and Wagnall Encyclopaedias too then, eh?" said I, mustering all my sarcastic wit and reminding her we live in a paperless online age. Naturally, she won out and the NatGeos won their reprieve and so too did the copies of Better Photography by virtue of being in the bottom of the cardboard boxes..
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Well, if I wasn't already sufficiently indebted to this marvellous woman for all the times she's reminded me I've forgotten to put out the bins on a Thursday night, I now owe her one enormous thank you for keeping these magazines in my life. I have begun rereading from the first edition and rediscovered the awe and excitement I felt way back then for the talented artistry of great film photographers. In an age of disposable digital images that rarely find their freedom from our screens and hard drives it's been wonderful to read again about the careful art of crafting beautiful photographic prints. From the story behind the choice of lens, selecting the film with just the right amount of grain and colour saturation, the time spent getting to a remote location and then exploring what elements of good composition were considered in making a great photo. Then to be taken through the artist's method in picking the right paper and the best printing technique before mounting and framing the final print to be hung proudly on a gallery wall has been a refreshing reminder of the time of slow photography..
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I'm loving this process of rediscovery and am finding new inspirations to explore and imitate. It's been an unexpected surprise, and a lesson in holding on to the things that inspire me. Another wonderful sidelight has been reading about the very latest cutting edge technology emerging in the mid-nineties. Using the stories from Better Photography magazine I'm going to write a series of posts looking back on the future of photography from 15 years ago. It will revisit the latest developments in black and white film that can be developed without a darkroom, the emergence of the World Wide Web and how it could be useful for photographers, and an interesting piece for fans of Sony's new Alpha range which might just prove there is nothing new under the sun..
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Look out for it, I hope there will be something in each edition for everyone!

An important advantage Flickr has over Google Plus

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Thu, 1 Sep 2011 00:53:00 +1000

A couple of days ago a popular G+ mate of mine, Lotus Carroll, put out a call to anyone interested in joining her new Parenting Circle. She has a large and adoring following thanks to her unique take on photographing herself and the flowers and bugs in her garden and, as I type, more than 200 of her fans have eagerly asked to be added to her new Circle.

For Lotus this is more than just an indication of her sudden and deserved popularity, it’s also a great opportunity to leverage off her 10,000 followers and perhaps grow a whole new following around her thoughtful and entertaining writing.

But this new development for Lotus is also an example of the significant limitations inherent within Google’s Circles.

Let me explain.

Two aspects of the new G+ platform were particularly compelling for me when I first heard about the beta trial. First, it’s a Google product and I’m an advocate for so much of what they develop I was very eager to get inside and see how they solved the social networking challenges - just ask my Flickr contacts who witnessed me pathetically pining for an invitation when they first appeared.

Second, I was very happy to learn about Google’s solution to the problems caused by the synchronous nature of relationships on Facebook. The Circles concept neatly solves the glaring challenge Facebook users have regarding sharing all their posts with all their contacts. [Insert well worn reference to school teacher whose students see pictures from her wild drunken birthday party] Giving users the ability to pick and choose who sees what content, Google Plus Circles neatly provides the solution Facebook wishes they’d baked in from the start and it was a very attractive feature that had me rushing over from Facebook.

Despite the wonderful granularity Circles bring to us as users, they create a problem all their own that limits their usefulness at promoting conversations and congregations. Take Lotus and her Circle of Parenting stuff. Lotus will publish her insights and anecdotes about raising the son she calls her Tiny King of Chaos and her Circle of eager followers will no doubt be moved and entertained by her stories. They will want to join in and write comments on her posts, sharing their thoughts on her experiences while also relating some of their own. Each post will quickly fill with a hundred comments and a hundred more +1s and we will all look forward to the next installment.

It’s a very successful model for Lotus but it quickly reaches it’s capacity as a means for her followers to congregate around the topic. Ivan Makarov has asked to be included in Lotus’ new Circle - he and his wife have just welcomed their third child to the world and Ivan has been posting some gorgeous photos of their week-old son. Ivan will get to know a new group of people as an active member of Lotus’ Circle but if he wants to begin sharing his experiences with little Alex among his new friends he has two inadequate choices. Either he squeezes as much as he can into a comment on Lotus’ posts and risks becoming a thread hijacker; or he duplicates Lotus’ efforts by adding all the same people to a Circle of his own. They would, of course, all need to add him to one of their Circles in order to see what he posts.

The one-to-many nature of G+ Circles makes them wholly inadequate as a means to foster discussion and sharing between a defined group of people around a specific topic or interest.

Flickr is one place where people congregate around a topic and Flickr’s method of fostering discussion is to provide a means for users to create their own Groups for people to join. My first experience with Flickr was joining one of their very popular Delete Me critique groups where members post a photograph into the Group’s pool and other members vote on the worthiness or otherwise of the submission. It’s a place of very fast learning requiring very thick skin, but that’s a topic for another time.

Communication with other members of the Group is by a simple threaded discussion platform. A person will write a new post about their disdain for HDR photography, for example, and others will chime in with their own thoughts and opinions. Very quickly the thread takes on a life of its own and the original poster goes from conversation starter to just another voice in the crowd - exactly like we experience out here in 3D.

Google’s framework won’t lend itself to what Flickr calls Groups, but what it can accommodate is the creation of ‘public’ Circles. Imagine a Circle that has no owner so instead of Lotus Carroll creating her Circle of contacts who want to receive her (and only her) content, she creates a Circle that contains no people but users can choose to include posts to that Circle in their stream, like a subscription. Lotus can then share with that Circle a tale about how much destruction her son caused this morning just as she would with any other Circle and those “subscribers” or “members” will receive her jaunty tale in their streams and laugh along with her.

The very important difference though is Ivan Makrov can similarly post his own material to that very same Circle. This makes Circles able to behave like Groups because now Ivan, Lotus and anyone else can start a new post and everyone who has “joined” the Circle can contribute just as they can over at Flickr.

This is a feature I hear Google are working on and when it arrives it will take a little while for some users to get their heads around it. For one thing, a public Circle has characteristics quite the opposite of Circles as we currently know them. They will have a name or title known to everyone, all the people in the Circle will be visible and known, and nobody will have any ownership. So when Lotus creates her Parenting Circle everyone will know what it’s called, all the people inside will see who else is there, and the Circle will exist independent of Lotus - she could close her account and the Circle would live on.

This is a development Google needs to release sooner rather than later because it is a key element in fostering community and involvement and if G+ is to stay relevant it must cultivate a vibrant ecosystem of active and engaged users.

Google Plus iPhone app - Privacy fail

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:15:00 +1000

Google recently released an update for their Google Plus iPhone app and, while there are a couple of worthwhile new features, one or two problems make this update a huge fail.

Perhaps my biggest gripe about the previous release was the inability to + a user in posts and comments. This has been addressed in the new release.

To + a user simply hit the "+" key just as you do in a regular browser and start typing their name.

This really is a must have feature in this app and so far so good. But wait, there's a problem.... I have 6 guys named Daniel in my circles but when I start searching for Daniel only 4 appear in the dropdown list. Not good enough but I just need to type the full name of the Daniel I'm looking for, right? No. As soon as you press the spacebar the dropdown disappears.

This new feature is close to useless if you can't search for a user beyond their first name.

But it gets much worse. If you select a user name from the dropdown list their name doesn't appear in the comment in a tidy blue box like in a browser , their email address does!

This amounts to a significant privacy failure by Google because many users will have chosen not to disclose their email addresses only to have them inadvertently revealed by Google's own app. Better get that fixed, Google.

Why most HDR images are a fail.

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:21:00 +1000

In his 1926 novel, Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon was not referring to photography when he wrote "Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness" but had he been it would be one of the great truisms of the medium. His words have since been bastardised by others and re-attributed to him as various forms of "There is no light without shadow" and even this distorted version of his original statement is relevant to photography.

Ask 10 different photographers what elements are required in the creation of a great photograph and maybe you'd get 10 different responses but I'm guessing a common theme would be that nearly all great photographs capture a great moment in great light. This is where HDR photography nearly always fails. This is why in decades to come no HDR image will be on any Greatest Photos of All Time lists.

High Dynamic Range images have become wildly popular with photographers since digital bodies have become ubiquitous and software like Photomatix has made the procedure simple. Unfortunately, just as a little knowledge can be dangerous, a tonemapping application in the hands of an unskilled operator with a poor eye can be disastrous. Fortunately we've largely moved on from the garish plastic looking rubbish popular a little while back but we still have an epidemic of awful HDR images that seem to be filling people's portfolios at a greater rate than ever before.

For me, the best test of a well processed HDR image is whether or not it looks like an HDR image. Far too often it's plainly obvious when an image has been processed using this technique. I've been dismayed by the rush of obvious HDR images flooding my Google Plus stream from shooters who perhaps don't appreciate that gimmicks don't equate to content and that an absence of whites and blacks cannot equate to great light.

Look at the histogram of almost every HDR shot that floats by and you'll see a perfect bell-curve showing an abundance of mid-tones and a dearth of blacks and whites. This is the tell-tale signature of a poorly processed HDR image and it provides the answer to why most HDRs are so easily recognised. Some commentators will tell you it's an attempt to recreate the scene as our eyes would have perceived it but that's just plain wrong. Our eye is capable of resolving detail across a 20 f-stop range but not simultaneously across a scene because we actually perceive around 6½ stops at any given brightness. Assuming an average DSLR sensor captures a range of 10 f-stops, a single exposure will reproduce more simultaneous detail than we can see with our eyes.

HDR images are often instantly recognisable because the image contains detail from many more than 6½ f-stops - maybe as many as 30 or 40 - and we innately know such detail is never available to us in nature.

So why do it? I'm all for the creative use of the tools at our disposal such as cross processing, bleach bypass, and dodging and burning which have all been a part of photography since Cocky was an egg. But none of those techniques is capable of turning an ordinary photo into something more and the same applies to HDR tonemapping. A great photo cannot exist without at least two of great light, great timing and great composition.

Tonemapping an ordinary photograph creates only a more ordinary photograph. Taking a great photograph makes tonemapping redundant. So get out from behind your computer screens and go in search of great light, deep shadows and beautiful forms and stop inundating me with Highly Deletable Rubbish.

Google Voice now available Down Under

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Thu, 4 Aug 2011 18:53:00 +1000

As I logged into my Gmail account a few minutes ago I was presented with a delightful popup message informing me I can now make phone calls from within my Gmail account. Google Voice has been available in the US for some time and further international rollout has been promised and now delivered to Aussie Gmail users.

Phone calls can be placed to landline or mobile numbers for very competitive rates: US$0.02 per minute to landlines and US$0.14 per minute to mobiles. That's around half the cost of calls made with Skype and paired with Google's free Video chat and new Google Hangouts Skype must surely now be history. I can't think of a single reason to use Skype for paid services.

Calls to mobiles from your home phone cost AUD$0.30 per minute (may be plan dependant) so calls to mobiles are actually cheaper with Google Voice than with our national carrier, Telstra. What's more, depending on your home phone plan, calls under 10 minutes to landline numbers are also cheaper than Telstra.

US customers still get the best of Google Voice such as free local calls (for now) and text messages.

For more details and to see if Google Voice is now available in your country check out the official Google Voice blog.

Do you take photographs, or make them?

noreply@blogger.com (Damien) — Tue, 2 Aug 2011 22:42:00 +1000

As my own photography matures and as the power of the digital darkroom becomes increasingly more accessible I find myself becoming less satisfied by traditional aspects of photography and more drawn to the artistic possibilities of new media.

The move from film to digital was one I resisted for a very long time. One of the most challenging things about analogue photography is also one of the most rewarding and it is missing from digital photography. It can be hard enough getting to the location you want to shoot, then capturing the right light, and framing the best composition. The real science comes in calculating the right exposure for your scene because doing so as carefully as possible is crucial when shooting on film as getting it wrong can mean the difference between an acceptable image and a failure. The biggest difference between then and now is we had to take our shots and take our chances because there was no instant review from an LCD on the rear of the camera and it was not uncommon to wait as long as a week between taking your shot and seeing the developed image. By then the light, the location and the opportunity are all gone.

My film of choice was always Fuji Velvia. It is a very slow transparency film that produces gorgeously warm rich colours with very little grain and before the advent of digital photography an experienced shooter could often recognise Velvia shots by their signature colour profile - think of just about anything published in National Geographic in the 1990s.

The digital age has, of course, made much of the science of photography redundant. Not just because camera bodies are becoming more capable of determining the best exposure and super fast focus but because we can instantly see the results, recompose, compensate exposure and reshoot - again and again of necessary. The quiet alchemy of considered analogue photography has been replaced by the ready-fire-aim age of disposable digital images.

This is one of the characteristics of digital photography that has lead me to seek more thoughtful photographic subjects. The other is my growing awareness of the lack of actual creativity in so much of today's popular photography. Some of the most popular shooters in the online community are good examples of what I've become more disenchanted by with time. A Flickr friend of mine, Thomas Hawk, has developed a large following based on his prolific library of (mostly) urban subjects - street portraiture, architecture abstracts, and his great collection of neon signs. Trey Ratcliff, every bit as popular as Thomas, specialises in tonemapped HDR images of natural landscapes and citiscapes. Now both these guys are very talented photographers and they produce images the likes of which I can maybe fluke once in one thousand attempts but I'm becoming more aware of a certain artistic ingredient missing in their prolific and popular portfolios. TH and Trey are very good at taking photos but what they do very little of is make photos.

The Forbidden Corner by Trey Ratcliff

To be able to isolate a great abstract composition the way Thomas does is a gift I wish I had. To access the extraordinary locations Trey gets to shoot would be a dream come true. But the thing about their photography, and most other popular photographers, is they capture something beautiful that was not of their making. A clever composition of a sculpture or a temple is a clever composition of someone else's work and I'm finding myself drawn more towards the emerging talents of artistic photographers

Coincidently, Plate 2 by Thomas Hawk

I recently discovered a very talented guy who is producing some wonderfully creative photographic art. Aaron Nace is a great photographer and master Photoshopper who has been producing outstanding images unlike anything I've seen online before. Aaron creates unique works of art using some amazing setups and very clever post processing and the thing I like most about his images is they are all original and created from nothing. Unlike a great shot of a bridge or a lake none of Aaron's subjects would exist if he hadn't created them himself. This type of photography is only possible since technology has become powerful enough to do the heavy lifting required for such significant image manipulation and I believe Aaron's work is taking digital photography to an aspirational level and represents the type of creativity that will separate great photo opportunists from great photographic artists.

Rebirth by Aaron Nace. Click image to see larger version on Flickr

The Flood by Aaron Nace. Click image to see larger version on Flickr

Aaron has tutorial videos on his website that show detailed instructions for creating these and other images from scratch.