50,000 views

A bit of a milestone, the usual Pride-oriented surge in hits has meant that the photos on my Flickr account just passed 50,000 cumulative views. Although unlikely to be troubling the Alexa rankings anytime soon, it's pretty decent for one guy with a camera he bought three years ago and had to learn what "aperture" meant. I think I've a realistic view of my ability now and the work I still have to do but it is nice to see the distance travelled to date.

Cheers to anyone who's ever appeared in one of my photos, especially if you didn't really want to. Cheers to anyone who's used one of my photos, in print or online, whether you paid me or not. Cheers to anyone who's given my photography a kind word, or indeed honest critique. Cheers to the many beautiful places who've given me someting worth photographing and to anyone who's stood, danced, partied, marched or rioted in front of my lens.

Cheers guys.

In fact, not only did Pride & Rushcart tip me over the 50,000 hits line but boosted me all the way to, at time of writing 73,000 views. That is to say that I got nearly a 50% boost to my views in the space of a week.



I'd noticed that my account seemed to be getting more hits for innocuous searches on various search engines of late, including Flickr itself. It's almost as though my visibility had increased. That, combined with the two large events over the bank holiday weekend seem to have been a perfect storm resulting in the hits spike.

Saddleworth Rushcart 2013

The day after Pride, a friend invited me to Rushcart in Saddleworth. Essentially, it stems from a tradition whereby a cart would be processed around the villages and hamlets and piled high with offerings of bullrushes from each with which to carpet the floor of the church. It’s a fascinating tradition and worth reading up on but more importantly from my own selfish viewpoint it makes for a great photo op, not least because those processing the cart are Morris dancers. I was astonished at how far some of the Morris troupes had come- from all over England it seemed, and the hundreds upon hundreds of locals (and presumably visitors too) who turned out to see the procession, the Morris dancing performances, the wrestling, the gurning competition and other British folk traditions.




As always, the full set are available on my Flickr account.

Manchester Pride Parade 2013

It was my home city of Manchester’s annual gay Pride parade on Saturday, one of the largest and longest-running of such parade’s in the country thanks to our sizeable LGBT community centred around the gay village of Canal Street and the surrounds. It's a great event and all of 100 metres from my home and it’s probably the best photo-op that the city has to offer so I did my usual thing of clambering up to one of the deep window ledges of the former warehouse buildings that dominate the area and snapped over the crowd as the parade went past. It’s been a decent tactic in previous years and resulted in a number of my more successful (according to recorded views) photos but it does mean that I essentially get the same shots year on year. I think next year I’ll aim to get to the front of the crowd and use my 50mm prime instead. Push myself to try different approaches.

The parade was good, if perhaps not quite as good as I've seen it in previous years. In 2010, they had Sir Ian McKellen and in 2011 they had a tank. That sets the bar pretty high. Still, some great costumes and the usual wonderful atmosphere.

The other observation is that my new 28-300mm lens really ain’t all that sharp. Now I knew it wouldn’t be given the range but I was expecting it to be sharper when compared with the lens it replaced (Tamron 18-250) and the price difference between them (the Nikkor being something like 4x the price), I was really expecting more. Nonetheless, I got some decent shots. Here’s a sample:

As always, the full set are available on my Flickr account.