CURIOUS ABOUT EVERYTHING - WELL, NEARLY EVERYTHING

 

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ATTRIBUTIONS AND PERMISSIONS

 

All photos are my own unless otherwise indicated.

 

I like people to use my photos for their own work and interest so the default permissions setting for my photos is the CREATIVE COMMONS category: ATTRIBUTION NON-COMMERCIAL SHARE ALIKE. So if you wish to use any of my photos on my Flickr pages non-commercially, please just go ahead but attribute using my screen-name or personal name, and/or provide a link back to my Flickr pages. If you want to use them commercially, please contact me to discuss fees, licence and rights. Some of the photos on my Flickr pages are by other people, either on my own camera or on theirs, and in these cases my default setting is ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, Scanned photos from our inherited family archive were mostly taken by numerous other people, many of whose identities we don't now know.

 

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PHOTOGRAPHIC INTERESTS

 

Professionally, I'm qualified in geology and marine biology and use my photography quite a bit for these professional interests. I've worked as a research scientist in the earth and life sciences with particular interests in living and fossil corals and reefs, regional geology, sedimentology, biogeography, growth and form, ecology, landscape and general natural history, also history of science and scientists, particularly in relation to these fields.

 

I also have many other non-professional interests including (in no particular order) history and historical places, travel, railways, music, cycling, languages, films and books, gardens and of course photography. I live in an area of south London with plenty of open spaces, but I really like to get out of London especially to mountains and coasts, and to travel generally, whenever possible. In more recent years I've taken to photographing derelict places and old machinery, and trying create surreal scenes. I'm sometimes asked to do shoots of events. I've also developed an interest in using films, books, poetry etc., to create images inspired by them.

 

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ORGANIZATION OF IMAGES

 

My Photostream is often pretty random, not often thematic, or in any particular time-sequence, However, more recently i've been uploading a bit more systematically. See below about my use of Collections and Albums. I use tags and often use Flickr's map option (but I do have a backlog of both).

 

Flickr offers several kinds of photo organization. Camera Roll is an automated grouping of photos done by Flickr, and I've used the 'by date' option for this, since this provides something useful and different from Albums and Collections which I also use. I group my Albums inside my Collections, and sometimes group Collections within higher level Collections.

 

Unfortunately, in spite of much protesting and pleading on the Flickr forums and feedback pages by numerous users, Flickr no longer provides a direct link to Collections from users' home pages.

 

To see my Collections (1) click on Albums at the top of my home page, (2) click on the View my collections link top right on the Albums page, OR click on the 'more' (3-dot ellipsis) symbol top right to get a pull-down menu which includes a Collections link. (3) This will show a series of collections, represented by a grid of clickable images, each of which will take you an Album or Collection within that grid.

 

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DARKROOM DAYS / DARKROOM DAZE

 

I started photography as a pre-teen, with simple film cameras including an Agfa bellows camera, and later a Kodak Retinette. I learnt to do my own darkroom processing and progressed to SLRs - Exacta then Nikon. I then switched to colour film and lab-processing. The bulk of my pictures are still on film and print and I have begun to scan some of them and upload them here too.

 

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DIGITAL DAYS / DIGITAL DAZE

 

I moved to digital photography in 2007 and started with a good quality Casio compact in order to learn the basics. In October 2009 I've used a Nikon SLR digital camera and since March 2011 I have also used iPhones. The quality of photos on my current iPhone7 has made my compact digital camera largely redundant and if it's inconvenent to carry my Nikon around, I just rely on my iPhone.

 

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EDITING

 

Usually I just use one or more of cropping, straightening, sharpening, red eye, contrast and colour balance. I also brighten some views to bring out details, partly because the weather in Britain is so often dull and cloudy and outdoor photos often look very flat. I started by using one or more of iPhotos, Flickr's Aviary, Photoshop and PowerPoint. Since then I moved from iPhotos to Apple's Aperture but when Apple abandoned both of those, and tried to switch users of them to their ridiculously useless Photos app, I moved to Lightroom CC.

 

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[Last revised July 11th 2017]