Image titled “red right hand”from flickr taken on the 16/08/2005
Recently on flickr, the above imge that I had uploaded nineteen years ago resurfaced. Thanks to a coment from a stranger. On the day I was using flickr’s excellent iPhone app to monitor my feed. One drawback of the mobile app is it is difficult to determine the context of any interactions and the image itself in this situatiuon. Once I was able to acces flickr on a desktop I was able to see that the image is in an album called concrete canvas.
I also was able to see if I had origianlly captered it as a raw file by using Neofinder to search all my drives. If I had it would enable me to reprocess the file and perhaps present it in a better way. Afterall digital editing software has come along way in the last ten years never mind nineteen. So I found the file opened it an pocessed it again even though all I had was a jpeg.. This is the outcome.
What still perplexes me though, is that the image somehow surfaced in a strangers stream all these years later? I can see they added it to their favourites so I’m grateful for that.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photogrpahs in the 21st century.
I am now well past my 60th rotation of the sun. I recently attended a former teachers funeral and this has me thinking about lots. I’m planning on posting a little more often here as a consequence. Also, I recently read over on cogdogblog ways to use a blog as an aid to your memories. This current blog only dates back to 2020. So to really get a sense of what I have done since the internet arrived in 1995 I’m listing several other blog and social media activities that have formed part of my creative online life. As best as I can remember. Here’s a list on my static site. The idea with this post is to hopefully have an archive of this activity.
My blogger.com page I posted a phone camera image daily , in a curated and interconnected way from 2004 to 2010
From 2004 to 2010 I blogged on blogspot.com, now a google property, and used a phonecam to achieve this. It was called s2art’s mophone photography blog. I was at the same uploading regularly and frequently to Flickr.com. Then I used tumblr for the same ends called lo-res daily. This was just before Instagram became big. The tumblr still exists but my posting frequency is spotty at best. This particular tumblr was actually a Sub-Tumblr as I had already setup a tumblr in 2007 [s2z.tumblr.com] which mainly hosted links and other text snippets; in the beginning anyway.
A screen grab from my Tumblr page taken on 22nd of January 2024
Somewhere in all of this was a self hosted movable type, blog thanks to Cos. I blogged there from 2006 to 2011, thanks to the way back machine [internet archive] you can still read it.
My Movable type site archived at the internet.org
Instagram became a huge focus for me around 2010. My original account is long gone however. Flickr and Tumblr at this stage were figuring highly in my life anyway. In amongst all of this were dalliances with Facebook, [I have deleted my data at least twice from that space]. Posterus, also sold and rebooted. ello.co now defunct and twitter a site that never really captured my attention. For all intents and purpose twitter has become colloquially, a ‘Hell Hole”. I still have an account there but rarely login to it.
Screen-grab of my old free WordPress site
In 2015, I had setup a free worpress blog, [s2zart.wordpress.com], this I ran until 2019, I briefly switched back to blogspot.com for 2 years, then setup this blog on my own server. My concerns over ‘data’, ‘search‘ and ‘privacy’ drove this change, along with ideas about the small web which were beginning to percolate though the internet generally.
A screen grab of my pinboard.in links page taken on 22 January 2024