The Advocate

I'm delighted to report that high-profile LGBT interest magazine The Advocate has prominently featured a number of my photos in their selection for an article of photos from this year's Pride parade in Manchester. My Pride photos garnered a lot of traffic this year, even more than in previous years, and it's great to see them featured in this way.

More exposure

A couple of bits of exposure over the last couple of days- first, a photo I took of a statue of Cupid in... Norway (or was it Denmark?) headed up an article on Wired.com. It's not my favourite photo by any means, but it serves the purpose. Then today, my city's local newspaper used an HDR photo I took of a local landmark in this article.

This is where stuff gets interesting- MEN didn't tell me they were using my picture, nor did they link to my Flickr account- a randomer commented on my Flickr account telling me that they'd used it. Then one of the other photographers whose photos had also been used. While it's fine for them to use my photo by the terms of the creative commons licensing I've placed on them, the other photographer enforces copyright on his and they'd not contacted him prior to using his photo either. Poor show for a professional publication.

I'm just grateful of the exposure, however, even if they're not generating me traffic through a link.

Fruition

I don't believe I actually mentioned it on this blog but, quite a while ago now, I received my fist payment to license one of my images. Well the project finally went live. It's part of a commemorative collection of Olympic stamps featuring photos from places on the Olympic torch route. Here's the photo in question:



It's actually one of my older photos, taken on my D3000. I'd probably have cleaned it up more these days but it clearly someone felt that it was good enough. Also I'm cheap! :D

Moral of the story: take risks

It seems that the deluge of redirections from various contintental news and blogging sites has died down now. The news cycle moves quickly. At least now I know what I have to do for exposure- war photographer.

I jest. Well, mostly.

I picked up my tripod on Saturday and my wireless flash triggers today. I'm still awaiting the flash itself but I've been able to confirm that the trigger and receiver are talking to one another. Hopefully the flash will arrive in the next couple of days.

I was in work on Saturday and was hoping to take some sunset/night shot photos from the 24th floor of my work building but the project finished up sooner than anticipated so that was a no-go. Never mind, there'll be another opportunity in 26 days.

Atypical levels of exposure

My paid Flickr account expired on August 6th. Despite the fact that my intention was to explore Google+-Picasa-Blogger connectivity for photos, the fact that there's been quite a bit of interest in the two photos I took of the burning car and the fact that I'd handed out a few business cards made me think that perhaps I should get the account back up in case anyone took a look.

I'm very glad I did; the paid account gives me access to stats and lets me see where my photos are being linked from. They're being linked from your run of the mill blogs like this guy but also a number of other more serious blog/news sites:

Economics Intelligence: 'The economics of riots and austerity'
Future Conscience: 'UK Riots: Are We Limiting Our Understanding of Violence?'
CommonDreams.org: 'Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots'
GOOD: '"If We Don't Riot, You Don't Listen to Us": The Case for Chaos'
NieuwsUit: 'Rellen in Engeland - Rellen in Manchester & Birmingham'
Youphil.com: 'Angleterre: la pauvreté, responsable des émeutes?' (currently featuring on their front page)

On top of that, the Wikipedia page about the riots features one of my images (albeit under slightly the wrong day- may have to edit that) with about a dozen Wiki news articles in various language using it.

That's... quite a bit more exposure than I'm used to.