Birmingham Pano

Birmingham Pano, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Spent last week on the road and was fortunate enough to spend a night in the Hyatt in Birmingham city centre. I’ve stayed plenty of times in the past but have either not had my camera or not been on a high enough floor to get a decent view of the surrounding area.

Finally the gods of hotel booking smiled on me and I got a room on the 19th floor and had my camera so I could get some half decent photos. I didn’t have a tripod so had to improvise with various bits of furniture/cushions and pillows.

The above shot is actually two photos stitched together using the excellent ‘Photomerge’ feature in Photoshop. I think these shots had an exposure time in the region of 20 seconds. This was enough to capture the detail in the clouds and blur the cars headlights a little. Annoyingly, there is a slight reflection of the hotel rooms curtain on the left hand side of the shot. I’m sure there’s a way that I could photoshop it out, but I didn’t think the shot was worth the effort.

Not a lot else to report really, it’s been another busy work week…and this week is shaping up to be just as bad. Hopefully I’ll get out and about at the weekend.

Winter road

Winter road, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Happy New year!

I assume if you’re reading this you take photos. I’m also assuming that you use flickr or something similar to share your photographs.

I was using the excellent bighugelabs.com flickr toys and was messing with their DNA tool to see what my most popular flickr pictures were last year.

The top 10 pictures garnered over 3,000 hits, which is small beer compared to most photogs, but for an amateur in his first year, I feel really pleased. 2 of my photographs also featured on flickrs ‘Explore’ feature, which I’m also chuffed about.

Out of my top 10 pictures, 7 of them where HDRs and 3 of them were colour toned ‘fine art’ style pictures. It’s clear you have to do something unusual or original to stand out…or perhaps my photography just isn’t good enough to stand on its own two feet and needs post processing in order to get the attention.

Now I’m no expert, but here are the top 5 things I’ve learned to get a little bit exposure on flickr:

1. Comment on lot’s of photos. Comments are reciprocal, if you comment on someone’s pictures; they will come and comment on yours. You can then befriend them and comment regularly on each others pics. I’ve made some very good friends on flickr who have really helped me with my photography. I’ve heard it a hundred times and agree with it – “The best way to take good photographs is to look at other peoples.” It is so true.

2. Post images that look good as small thumbnails…either bright colours or simple shapes seem to attract people. If someone is scrolling through lots of pictures you want something that really pops out. Once you’ve established a “fan base” you can post whatever you like.

3. Personally I believe a few good pictures is better than lots of average ones. However, there are many people that disagree, I think a lot depends on your subject and style, personally I post 3-4 images a week. Find what works for you.

4. Groups – submit your photo’s to groups. If you have a taken a niche picture of a mushroom or a hot air balloon or an empty park bench, you will find a group full of people on flickr who are passionate about the subject and experts on photographing it. Every group has a forum and some of these are brilliant sources of information/advice.

5. Tags – Are still a popular method of finding pictures. Tag your pictures with anything relevant, so the picture on this post has the tags like – road, Scotland, Nairn, Highlands, HDR, “High Dynamic Range”, Clouds, Winter etc.

Finally, I'm thinking about a year long project....I was inpsired by the excellent "my tree" set by Zach Stern...I think I'll do something similar.