Building a Loose Leaf Sketchbook (for my camera bag)

http://apimageo.tumblr.com/post/172777515721/building-a-loose-leaf-sketchbook-for-my-camera

I'm not only revitalizing this blog. I always liked the idea of a behind the scenes place to post ideas and works in progress stuff, and I originally felt tumblr was a better place to do that than in here. So there is stuff going on over there occasionally but it will be reposted here as a embedded item

What will happen to flickr & Tumblr

This week Version announced they have bought Yahoo! for $4.5 billion and are bringing all their tech companies under the one Umbrella company Oath: 

This could be fine, but history of these big tech takeovers is littered with subsequent failures or at least falls from grace. Down in the story you will find that Marissa Mayer has resigned, with a nice golden parachute. However when yahoo originally took over flickr, it went into stagnation and it wasn't until Mayer became CEO and gave "the lets make flickr great again" speach that the current resurgence of flickr and its improved/modernised photostream displays happened. Similarly she championed and used tumblr, another decent social media place, you can read her final post here.

I hope and trust flickr & tumblr will survive the savage staff cuts that are certain to follow and these services are allowed to continue and perhaps even let flourish. Allowing both of them to provide serious competition to the google & facebook juggernauts.

Suddenly Instagram is beginning to look like my sketch books

I’m the first to admit I haven’t figured out the appeal of Instagram, other than its easy of use and a way fast disposal of images (short viewing life and soon forgotten). Then again I have had fun in the grid view with mosaicked images and I’m still posting in threes, BUT….

What the? I’m still posting to my art project specific account @oz_endless_summer and the posts are starting to go all over the place, a bit of that here and something different there and then back to something else. This is starting to look like the contents of any of my sketchbooks. The worry is, the more I blunder around, the more likes pop up and the followers while going up and down are at least growing. Making all this harder to understand.

What is worse I do already have an on-line sketchbook which has gone from “My Daily Sketch” (it was last years commitment that didn’t last) to “My Occasional Sketches” (aka myscratchings.tumblr.com) on tumblr. Yes I post much the same stuff there still as well. Tumblr being in my opinion a much better platform, specifically I can control the links and syndication. Importantly it is not a walled garden like instagram. However tumblr is quiet (not as dead quiet as Google+ has become) but not many see my stuff and few like or comment. I’d convinced myself no one was interested in my works in progress and idea development. I just didn’t know where and who. So it looks like it time to toast Sketchbook Instagram.

Such is life

PhotoProject :: The Art of Photography :: Assignment 1 Variations

I was looking for a place to put this gallery of photos in  just one spot and avoid reposting across the social web. (ie still looking for a suitable POSSE approach, Post [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere)  I haven’t found a viable solution yet, so this post duplicates images already posted on tumblr and/or flickr and not to forget instagram. What it shows is all the photos together.

What the? ..A disturbance in the force

Yesterday two lots of photos that I had uploaded independently disappeared. I’m pretty sure they are not examples of “old timers” disease because I can see evidence that the flickr uploadr believe the image was already uploaded.

Monday night was beautifully clear after the moon set and I staid up late (despite a heavy working bee during the day) and captured some large night sky photo. I quickly autostitched them and uploaded from my laptop via wifi to a hotspot with my phone (it was probably after midnight). All seemed good.

I drove back up to Melbourne next morning and synched my photo from my laptop to me desktop computer, as I normally do.  My desktop has the Auto Flickr Uploadr monitoring specific directories. No problems obvious.

My grand daughters had left some bubble pipes and shapes and so I bought them with me to experimented with soap bubbles and paint as a way to create another background for my on going carbon foot print series. Don’t try working with bubbles outdoors on a windy day. Working indoors was also not wise as I wasn’t sure how messy it would be. When I uploaded a set of photos to my scratching blog on Tumblr all was well, but when I went over to flickr. My milky way veratrama had disappeared! I though the uploadr was to blame but it also suggested I did already upload the photo. Ok I just uploaded manually (and it definitely worked. Also my photo from yesterday seems ok. Damn now the bubble photos are missing from tumblr. Uploaded them again. All very strange.

By The Way, if you have a free account on Flickr the auto Uploadr will stop working next week (23rd March) but I don’t think these hiccups are associated with that. I’m not a conspiracy theorist so the fact that a blogged about it, is probably just coincidence. C’est La Vie.

CreativeSpaces a little exercise each day

I was actually listening to a radio article this morning about avoiding dementia, which promoted the idea of keeping active, both physically and mentally as the best way to avoid the onset of memory loss and related problems. I’ve also been reminded on podcasts and in discussions that this is the time of the year to start a 365 project. So why not just have a personal resolution to really exercise my creativity on a daily basis but I’m going to stretch myself to do both a sketch (or artwork) as well as taking an photo, and posting them both daily (or close to daily). Havent really planned it out yet but I will start with the photos in flickr and the art work in tumblr.

So here is Day One

My sketch is just a very quick watercolour of a grape vine on my back porch as I have a coffee	Ok I’ve cheated this is just a photo of my sketch, rather than the obvious by more boring photo of what I sketched.

Here are some good tips from 356project.org on how to start and keep at it.