Vanity Publishing (Part 1)

in General Rants , Monday, July 03, 2006

I've finally started to consider the statistics I get from my web hosting provider, just to see if anybody ever clicks on all this stuff. Well, it seems they do. Not so many, but whoever you are, thanks for stopping by. Statistics, as is well known, are used by web site publishers much lamposts are used by drunks - for leaning on, not for illumination. So, leaning on a few here, I find that over the period Dec 2004 (the oldest data my ISP stores) and Jun 2006, the number per month of succesful requests for pages has gone from 10,677 to 22,6111. Better than a kick in the teeth with a sharp trowel, if not exactly T.O.P territory. The other stats more or less follow the same trend. For some reason, I hit some sort of spike in March 2006. No idea why. Of course, another statistic is error logs. Looking at error logs is a bit like looking at bank statements. You know you have to, but you get a sickening feeling in your stomach as you look at the numbers. Well, whoever the 113 people are who tried to access the broken link /pblog/archives/archives.html, sorry. I'll try to fix it. As for the 2071 web crawlers who tried to access robots.txt, tough. I've also wondered if it is worth actually putting all these photos on line. Is anybody looking at them ? Well I've started counting. For the last two weeks, every time a full size photo is accessed from the database, I've been updating a counter, so I can see which photos people are looking at, and how often. The exciting results of this survey are coming soon. Stay tuned!!

Cutural Issues

in General Rants , Monday, June 26, 2006

Meanwhile, over at the highly productive and entertaining auspiciousdragon.net, Colin wrote an entry in response to a comment I made on a previous entry (still with me here ?), which I turn would like to expand on. Colin wrote:

I recently wrote a short essay called In defence of the non-luminous landscape where I tried to draw a distinction between landscape photography that met cultural ideals and landscape photography that was a much more personal reaction to the land. Both forms can be satisfying to look at, but I find the cultural norm sort very unsatisfying to produce. I'm not in the business of making mass market calendars

This leads me to wonder about these "cultural ideals". Are succesful landscape photographers such as David Noton, Charlie Waite or David Ward, following cultural ideals ? Can we consider that they do not have a personal reaction, because they are popular ? Is there something inherently wrong with emphasising beauty in landscape ? Is it perhaps that "real" photographers only do black & white ? In fact, I'd even say that the sort of B&W stuff which typically decorates "tasteful" Habitat-furnished homes is a far worse offender when it comes to purely decorative unchallenging dreck masquerading as art. We are all part of a culture. We are conditioned by that culture. We see wild landscape as beautiful, or at least interesting, whereas in an earlier culture we'd have seen it as hostile or just a wasteland of non-viable farmland. Cultural conditioning works both ways, it is both shaped by us and shapes us. Maybe there is some confusion between "cultural ideals" and "popular culture", or even "pandering to the lowest denominator". But to be honest, if you line up a series of standard "local views" postcards in any seaside tourist shop, alongside the same scenes shot by, say, Joe Cornish, I bet a pound to a penny that the flat, midday sun, blue sky "Greetings from Sunny Skegness" will outsell the more artistic stuff by 20:1. Just because a photo has a visual attractiveness, or is taken in dawn light, does not make it necessarly unchallenging or even unsettling, and it certainly does not rule out a "personal reaction" on the part of the photographer.

New use for film

in General Rants , Friday, June 23, 2006

Zuerich camera retailer Foto Baern has certainly come up with a very post-modern take on film



If you can't work it out, the photos show shop window layouts, mimicking football fields, where the "spectators" are 35mm film canisters of various types, and the "players" are cameras...all digital apart from the odd Leica.
Some of the films (shock, horror, etc) are even unused!!

XPan R.I.P.

in General Rants , Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Totally unbelievable news reported here on ePhotozine: Due to EU regulations on lead in electronic circuitry, Hasselblad (or, to be more accurate, Fuji) are discontinuing the XPan camera with immediate effect. Massive SUVs belching out fumes and devouring fuel at an incredible rate whilst taking the kiddies to school and back are, however, still perfectly ok. Wasting enormous amounts of resources moving the EU parliamentary bodies between Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg, still perfectly ok - well we wouldn't want the French to feel insecure, would we ? Whatever. I'm sure it will push up the resale value....

Off Sick

in General Rants , Thursday, September 29, 2005

Well, I'm sitting at home with my right forearm in plaster, after emergency surgery on Monday night to an infected cut on my right thumb. My fault for not going to the doctor earlier, but a remarkable piece of incompetence by a bunch of morons in a hospital in a certain southern Swiss city didn't help. Fortunately their colleagues in Zürich are somewhat more skilled. Anyway, once I'd figured out how to type with my left hand only, I used some of my enforced downtime to (slowly) fix a few things on this site. First, I've started to cull the photo galleries, which were getting too big. I'll try to improve the quality / quantity ratio. Next, I revised the photo links page to bring it up to date. It is now database driven and hopefully more interesting. A few other changes are sprinkled about...I hope they work!