The Darker Skies Photography Blog

A while ago i mentioned a couple of services that were helping me backup work and my website, giving me a little bit more piece of mind. I have another service to recommend that i’ve been trying for the last few days. It all started with a WordPress TV video that dealt with everything you want to know about website security – any website, not just WordPress powered ones. It’s a recommended watch and can be found here. The security service i’ve started using is called Cloudflare, mentioned...

The last couple of days have been among of the most painful I’ve ever experienced. Strangely, Grandma’s funeral last Thursday wasn’t the worst part – the emptying of the bungalow she called home the following day takes that honour. Something felt very wrong. It was all very surreal and immensely sad as the furniture was carried away. One of the more common sentiments among many of the village residents present at the funeral and afterwards, was that it was the end of an era for the village...

No it isn’t a great image, and no i’m not becoming one of those ‘visual artists’ who use images from Google Street to make art. This screen capture image, though fuzzy and blurry, is an important find…. at least to some people. Last weekend, the last in the line of my grandparents died. My Grandma was 93. The family is still coming to terms with the events of the past ten days. Somehow you believe that people will always be there. We fool ourselves into thinking that time stands still when...

Bamburgh castle from the sand dunes I’m currently reinstalling everything back onto my laptop. Great fun! After around 18 months of flawless use, the laptop finally started freezing on me in critical situations, so i decided to do a factory reset. A drastic move, i know, but it means a fresh, clean laptop ready to go soon. It’ll just take me several days to put all the software back on it. Fortunately there was nothing on the hard drive of great value. I backup to DVD-ROM and memory stick,...

It’s not been a bad start to 2012 on the website front, so i thought i’d do a little roundup of the highlights. The new RichFlintPhoto | 50mm Tumblr blog is set to stay, and i may even invest in a better theme for the site later this year. It difficult to describe the difference between a Tumblr blog and the WordPress/Blogger, so lets just say it’s a nice, quick, daily updated addition to the blog family. Check out 50mm on Tumblr at http://richflintphoto.tumblr.com/ I also invested a little...

OK, OK, I admit it. I severely underestimated the amount of work needed putting together the Norfolk project book. This week i added more images to the gallery for the project on my website, and it suddenly dawned on me the task that lay ahead. It’s pretty damn big. I want to do a good job on this book. No, actually i want to do a fantastic job on this book, and it seems only right for me to take my time doing it. I have hundreds of images to go through, and i have to choose a total of 100...

“ Some pros are dabbling with digital but most still shoot on film “. A remarkable claim by the great Eamonn McCabe made on BBC Radio 4 recently. I’ve been a fan of McCabe’s work ever since i first saw his sports photography in a copy of amateur photographer around 20+ years ago. In this case though, Eamonn seems to have got it rather wrong. The problem is, is that photographers tend to believe that everyone works like they do – I shoot mostly on film, so therefore everyone else does. Only...

Yes! Yesterday, the final galleries of the portfolio were converted over to the SlideShowPro system and the WordPress gallery plugin I’d been using was deleted. I finally got rid of what i regarded as the weak link in the chain from the website. The gallery plugin hadn’t been updated for over a year, with the developer just abandoning his creation – no word, no improvements, nothing! I just knew that eventually i would update WordPress and find that the galleries no longer functioned. Sadly,...

No matter how hard i try, sometimes i just can’t understand the attitudes of certain photo bloggers. Take today for instance. In the news with have the launch of the Nikon D4 and the rumbles of what looks like the end of that once mighty photo leviathan called Kodak. Both stories reflect how quickly the photo industry can change, It wasn’t that long ago that Nikon was seen as lagging some way behind Canon in the digital technology stakes. Now Nikon seem to have the edge. Kodak’s demise is sad...

I’ve decided to start something new for 2012 and it comes in the shape of a Tumblr blog called 50mm. Unlike my other wondrous blog creations, Tumblr will feature quick, short, daily posts of images, audio, video and text. AudioBoo links in too. So it’s short and simple posts full of photography miscellanea as i call it. It is experimental, so it won’t be linked into Twitter just yet, but it should be fun to have a play around with. You can visit my little 2012 experiment at...

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 18 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the complete report.

On the Tyne Bridge – Newcastle Upon Tyne

For once i appear to be ahead of schedule. The new website design went live a week ago. There’s still plenty of work to do on the website but it’s a good start. The next phase of the redesign process focusses on the portfolio galleries. The new website design allows easier expansion of the website. Already a number of ideas have come to mind. The other benefit is that, at least so far, the design seems to be functioning perfectly – no hidden gremlins to work on. A number of new website feature

I can barely believe it myself, but i’m actually going to change the design the main website after only ten months of the current theme. The reason? Well it comes down to technical support, or in this case the lack of it.During the early part of 2011, the website was rebuilt with WordPress used to power it. I’m immensely happy with the way that decision turned out. I’ve become a BIG WordPress fan and the website will continue to be powered by this fantastic content management system.The problem came with the theme i choose. What worked well on the demonstration page, turned out to suffer from ...