I’ve not tinkered with the site for some time – I think the last time was messing about with the Flickr widget in the sidebar almost a year ago while I was meant to be revising for my finals – so I thought I’d have a little play around and produce an actual logo for socialphoto. It was pretty simple to do in Gimp, even considering my otherwise complete lack of skills. (The only thing that annoys me about Gimp is that it opens in X11.)

Of course, adding it into the header and removing the previous stuff in the header should have been completely easy. Except, of course, it ended up not being quite so simple, after a few minor CSS quibbles I had. I think it’s pretty much sorted now, although in Firefox and IE the logo has a noticeable white frame, which doesn’t appear in Safari and Chrome. Why that happens, I’m not entirely sure – it’ll get ironed out in time, I hope.

Anyway, I have a few more plans for the site to get done in the next couple of months: firstly to move it to a blog.socialphoto.co.uk subdomain (which given wordpress and all the plugins I have may not be entirely easy), and to make myself a nice little front page with bells and whistles to boot. I can’t promise it’ll be done soon, but hopefully it will be done at some point.

I noticed the other day a post about the ‘rule’ that you shouldn’t decapitate or amputate people in photographs. Needless to say, the post went on to say that actually, doing just that could be perfectly acceptable. Not much of a rule, is it? Don’t get me started on the ‘rule of thirds’ – another one you can choose to break, for aesthetic effect.

Of course, you should never under- or over-expose your shots, unless it looks good.

And always – always! – focus on the eyes in a portrait…

The thing is, there’s no such things as rules when we’re talking about photography (or indeed any other creative pursuit – poetry, painting or piano playing). There’s some guidelines to make casual shots at least half-decent, like the ‘don’t decapitate’ rule, or the rule of thirds. Following these will give you, I’m sure, perfectly acceptable shots. But it doesn’t mean that anything else won’t be just as decent. You might have to practice a little more to get rule-breaking shots that work, but then how are you going to develop your own style unless you do what you think looks good, and not what someone has told you is a rule?

All these ‘rules’ are nothing more than tips, starting points and suggestions. Calling them rules gives them, in my opinion, too much weight, and they’ll be understood by some to be actual rules.

The only caveat I would make, however, is this: whether you choose to follow ‘rules’ or follow your gut feeling when it comes to taking a shot (and editing/developing it, of course), do what you’re doing for a reason. Don’t bounce the flash because someone told you, but because you want that quality of light. Don’t underexpose because you don’t understand how to use your camera properly, but because you want to. That’s all I ask: be deliberate.

The only rule there should be in photography is that HDR is rubbish…

Image: I figured since this post was a reflection on photography itself, we could do with a tree reflected in water. Bit lame, but there you go…!

It’s been a while since I fiddled with this blog, but you may have noticed a few minor aesthetic changes recently:

1. Post images now have a black border, instead of silver. Where these images function as links, they have a small inner border that is normally black but silver on hover. Why? I think photos look better framed in black than silver. Nuff said.
2. I’ve also resized these images to fit better with the new borders. This may result in a short delay for some visitors as the software generates a new image on some posts, but once it’s cached it’ll be speedier.
3. I added a new widget – Quick Flickr widget in this case. Some fiddling with CSS was required to display my latest Flickr images satisfactorily; big thanks to mgdm for also having a poke through all the PHP and fixing me up with a way to discern between landscape/portrait/square aspects.
4. The Twitter widget is gone. I don’t tweet as @socialphoto very often. To be honest, I only got the account to reserve the name once I bought this domain. If you do want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @jkblacker.

There are more changes I want to make, some smaller than others. I’ve got two more exams this week, and then I’m done and free to make some stuff happen on here.

Oh, and I also removed a link from the ‘Sites I like’ because of HDR related crimes against photography.

Update, 19/5 – Following something of a spike in traffic, I’ve finally found a decent related posts plugin that works with YAPB. The previous one was for some reason duplicating YAPB images, so I didn’t use it. In a twist, it was called YAPRPP or something like that – yet another ‘yet another’ plugin. But I digress. I’m now using Contextual Related Posts, which seems to be doing the job pretty danged well.

I’ve been pretty busy over the last week getting some work finished, but in the next couple of weeks I’m aiming to get a few really interesting images shot and posted here and on flickr, so keep your eyes on that RSS feed!

One of my 2009 aims is to post more and grow the site a bit – it feels quite lonely, just me at the moment, but we’ll see where this leads.

You can now follow me on twitter: twitter.com/socialphoto. Not only will you get notified of new posts here on socialphoto.co.uk, but I might say a few interesting things as well.