Photoblogging 2: Periphery, The New Photoblog (I Still Love You, Flickr)
Before I continue, let me point out periphery.tangentialism.com, which I finished this weekend. It's a Photoblog-with-a-capital-P that I'll be directing my daily photos at for a while, supplemented by Flickr for random shots and sharables.
I wrote Periphery because I've spent too long telling other photobloggers that "I really want to have my own photoblog". I love Flickr, and I've been posting regularly there for over a year, but while I use it to photoblog, it didn't feel like "my own photoblog". It's been very good for me, both as a photographer and as a photoblogger, and the community of sharing there is so rich that I don't see any reason to leave, but as even Eric Costello points out, in this interview with Adaptive Path, Flickr wasn't originally put together for Photobloggers-with-a-capital-P:
Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends...
But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now.
In fact, I've changed with Flickr. When I signed up, I only imagined I'd post photos to share for kicks--and you can see that in my early posts, of signs and vacations and cameraphone shots. In the last year, mostly because of the vibrant local community of photobloggers, I've fallen back in love with photography, and with looking at nice, big images, which isn't Flickr's strong point.
In fact, the biggest problem with using Flickr to photoblog is that everyone's first glimpse of your photo is a wallet-sized snapshot, and I'd like people to be have a larger image to gaze upon when they load the page. On Periphery, that's about 900 pixels wide versus 240 pixels wide, which amounts to a lot when I'm posting a photo I'm proud of (ideally, every shot I post). Conversely, 900 pixels make it difficult to hide shoddy work, which raises the bar--a good thing.
Though I briefly considered using Eliot's Admiral package to get around the image size issue, while still keeping my roots in Flickr, I decided against it. Frankly, I think Flickr and I need some space. I've been asking too much of Flickr lately, expecting Flickr to be all things to me at all times. I'll still call Flickr up for daily shots of friends and odd visual couplings (just like old times), but I think the new space at Periphery will make for an interesting change in how I work and edit, and I need that change.
Working on Periphery was incredibly fun, and it came together very quickly (about three weeks in my free time). It's written in Ruby on Rails (geek out!) with a couple judicious visual effect-y, AJAX-y things. I'm holding a couple features back until I have enough photos to make them interesting, but I'm already happy with the way it works. Hopefully you will be, too.
Thanks are in order to a few people: Eliot and Raul's sites both served as inspirations for the layout and features of the site. In particular, the navigation effects are the sincerest form of flattery of Eliot's (and Kottke's) work. Actually, if they're listed in the "Links" section of the photoblog, they're probably an inspiration in one form or another. Thanks to Raul, Keith, and Nick for looking it over and offering advice. And thank you, so much, to Flickr. I'm here because of you, Flickr.
Posted by tangentialist at October 17, 2005 08:08 PM | more tangentialism
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Comments
David,
Looks great - I want one too...
So (I am always curious about creative process and decisions): what is your rationale/framework for posting? Do you have a set goal of posting at least one photo a day? Is it always taken that day?
There is something appealing about that sort of automatic capture, where at a set time or place or circumstance you document what you see. I've been playing with that in a different sort of way, documenting information in one case (http://www.marginnotes.net/taxonomy/categories/monday-morning-gas/) and, in another, the changing shape of a new building that is being constructed on my way to work. For that one I take the same shot from the same spot every morning, so that eventually the growth of the building can be seen in a (long) slideshow. I think it's an interesting concept, seeing what taking a picture of the same spot every day ends up capturing that differs from day to day....
Then there is the possibility of a daily self-portrait, which I haven't been vain enough to launch yet (or really I just keep forgetting).
Posted by: sutton at October 18, 2005 10:15 AM
wow, bigger is a lot better. i like the slide-thingy (very technical term) on the top nav.
for me, flickr seems to have become a repository for photos. either good, bad, or extra that don't make my site. (that's not to say that the ones that do make my site are good)
Posted by: tien at October 18, 2005 11:23 AM
