Sheerness on Sea, England. 2024
Leica M-P (Typ240) with the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens and a B+W ND filter.
Lunch break
Coast
Sheerness on Sea, England. 2024
Crop from the original image – Click to enlarge.
Leica M-P (Typ240) with the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens and a B+W ND filter.
Patterns
Minster on Sea, England. 2024
This is the old Military Canal that runs through Barton’s Point Coastal Park. The water here is brackish and I think this surface foam was caused by the last storm we had here in the UK.
Leica M-P (Typ240) with the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens and a B+W ND filter.
Dinosaurs
Sheerness on Sea, England. 2024
You maybe wondering why the title of this image. In post, while doing a little dodge and burn I noticed this gentleman’s umbrella is infact a child’s one with cartoon Dinosaurs all over it. Funny how you don’t see these things when you take a shot.
Leica M-P (Typ240) with the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens.
Drops
Barton’s Point Coastal Park, Minster on Sea, England 2023.
Leica M-P (Typ240) with the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens.
Another day
Sheerness, England. 2024
Nikkormat FT2, with Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 Ai on Fomapan 100 Classic film with a yellow Photax filter.
Foam
Minster on Sea, England. 2022
Leica M-P (Typ240) with the Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH lens.
I shot this in December 2022 and love the light across the incoming water. In this image to me, the sea foam almost looks like snow across the beach shingle. Like all these things I had forgotten about this picture. It’s great looking back find images you’d rejected or have escaped memory.
Some opinion and news
Flickr
I know some of you use Flickr but have any of you noticed a decline in it’s use in the last couple of years or so?
Since the image platform was taken over by Oath, then by SmugMug in 2018 the website seems to me at least to be dying. There just not the amount images being posted anymore since I joined in 2012. The discussion forums look empty with little or no new posts and the groups that I certainly follow have very few new uploads.
I’m not a paying user and therefore I don’t get ‘Stats’ so visits and such like. I don’t know how many I have or to be quite honest even care. What I have noticed is many of groups that use to have new posts daily don’t seem to anymore, if not at all for quite sometime. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of images still been posted. Most to me seem to be anything digitally manipulated, more ‘Gen Z’ selfies than I can count, and no end of ‘AI’ images have started to appear.
Tastes and formats in photography changing maybe or time to leave Flickr all together?
FlickrMail
Start of last year, I had to put a block on my FlickrMail as it gets filled with spam emails.
Since 2012 when I joined Flickr I’d never had any messages in my FlickrMail until after the Pandemic. All of a sudden, I started getting unwanted mail in my FlickrMail inbox, which in turn sends copies to my Gmail account. These included, invites from young women offering explicit images, claiming to offer money, usually in Dollars for my images linked to some very dubious websites. Messages telling me they’d buy camera or sell my gear for me and how to hack a free Flickr ‘Pro’ account or for Adobe Lightroom. Oh, and the best one, how to get thousands of ‘likes’ on your images, all for a fee of course. At one point after a weeks holiday abroad, I’d not been able to login onto email account. However, when I finally did get signal, I found in my Gmail inbox had over ninety spam emails from Flickr and in the course of deleting these, four more appeared in my Flickr inbox!
I did look up these ‘members’ on Flickr and most I found were either a private account or just one picture uploaded, in some cases the same image as their avatar. I emailed Flickr about this spamming problem with a reply email that said it was investigated. Eventually I received an email to say, they had blocked these members accounts, yet I was still getting some messages in my inbox. It was only after I Googled how to stop these FlickrMail messages I found that if I ticked ‘block messages from other members‘ and unlinked my Gmail from Flickr in account settings, that I finally stopped the issue altogether. OK, maybe I should looked into this either but you’d think Flickr would tell you about this option in their correspondence.
Turns out if you look up this ‘FlickrMail spam’ problem, I’m not the only member to complain to Flickr’s parent company SmugMug about this mail problem and it seems from what I’ve read they don’t seem to be able to stop it from happening to members FlickrMail accounts.
Funny enough, I left Instagram for the very same reason, although no where near as many messages sent to me. That and not being able to post my images in their original size or format just put off using their platform.
Nikon FE
Not having very much luck with film cameras of late. My FE has developed a ringing noise when firing the shutter. Hopefully the YouTube link below works if you want hear the problem.
This wasn’t a problem when the camera first started making this noise but I have noticed over time, that sometimes the mirror doesn’t always return straight away or if you tap the top of the camera it does finally drop back into place.
The advice from three separate camera repairers I’ve had so far, is that the mirror mechanism is failing and eventually it will stop working altogether. Due to lack of available parts for the mirror housing, the only way fix this issue is to find a donor FE or FM body. Unfortunately this will make the FE uneconomical to repair and I’ll have to decide whether or not it is going to be worth the investment.
It’s a real shame, I’ve grown very fond of this little camera.
Yesterdays shopping
Sheerness, England. 2024
Nikkormat FT2, with Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 Ai on Fomapan 100 Classic film with a yellow Photax filter.
Trailer trash
Sheerness, England. 2024
Nikkormat FT2, with Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 Ai on Fomapan 100 Classic film with a yellow Photax filter.
Outward flow
Minster on Sea, England. 2023
Nikkormat FT2, with Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 Ai on Fomapan 100 Classic film with a yellow Photax filter.
The Shootist 