Articles by John Oram

After due consideration tinged with more than a little sadness, I have decided to stick with ipernity until the end - or its new future. The small community on here has radiated a warmth which belies its size. It has always been difficult to inspire and maintain groups but perhaps this dark threat might presage a new dawn and rebirth for those who have worked so hard in France and for us all.

Having arrived at ipernity as a potential refugee, I am greatly disturbed at the prospect of having to embark on another journey. I am sad for the employees of ipernity, for the small band of loyal contacts and for myself. We need sites where photographs can be shared with acccompanying text and tags etc. rather than just dropped on to the internet as some sort of decoration without explanation. It is baffling that such sites are few and far between. There is a little hope as many of the r…

The journey started in 2013 in reaction to an apparent crisis elsewhere. It has not been plain sailing with a small if appreciative audience. It remains a shame that there are so few vibrant groups. But today I uploaded image number 10000 to ipernity and the relationship lives on.

Limits on uploading to groups can be restrictive if understandable in terms of the potential workload for the admin(s). They can, however, become somewhat annoying if they do not perform as expected. One group I belong to has a limit of three a day which is, indeed, restrictive in respect of what I could offer. What is really annoying though is that it does not seem automatically to reset after 'a day'. Reasonable exposure for ones pictures could more readily be achieved if one were able to a…

Ipernity has proved to be a welcome safe haven in the face of what, at one stage, looked like the implosion of Flickr. However, it has remained impossibly dull. No-one, no refugee at least, wanted it to become what Flickr had but the migrants had at least the benefit of seeing what works and what does not - although opinions on which features fit those categories will vary. For some reason, pictures on ipernity seem to get very little exposure even when added to the modest number of groups. I…

I have thousands of photographs on file. The ones I care to post are already on a competing but declining site. Today I have made a very small start on adding the older pictures to ipernity. It will be a long task but I hope that, in its small way, it will encourage greater interest in this site. I hope too that you enjoy the posts.

It is with real sadness that I prepare to retire my Panasonic FZ38. It was my first digital camera and has been wonderful. It has passed 19000 shutter activations and now has a sticky top dial. It has served me very well as have other Panasonic cameras which is why it was not difficult today to choose an FZ200 as a replacement. The current choice (for me) was between the FZ72 with an extraordinary 60x zoom and the FZ200 with an even more extraordinary fixed aperture of f2.8 (and a 24x zoom). My…

I have a concern about the very technology which brought about our digital photography revolution and continues to drive it. In the days of film photography both negatives and prints, cared for properly, could last more or less for ever. Digital files might not last as long if we are not careful. In the very age when the number of images has increased perhaps exponentially, the means by which we store them have a sort of inevitable obsolescence. Millions of the images created today record that w…

I am still a little disappointed with the relative lack of groups (partly in my own hands, I suppose) on ipernity and the smallish interactions compared to Flickr. Tonight, I am embarking on a fairly large exercise compared to what I have done so far and am upoading my recent railway photographs from Europe. It will take up to four hours to get to the standard of notes and keywords I try to achieve. I hope you enjoy them.

It is, perhaps, not the ideal motivation to use a site because another is so awful. I have tried very hard to retain Flickr as my primary site for uploads although I am very comforted by the availability and relative simplicity of ipernity. Flickr has, of late, become beset by bugs which receive attention only slowly and then with partial effectiveness. Tonight then, when it became temporarily impossible to upload, I turned to this site as a first place to upload today's simple photographs of So…

A couple of months have passed. I am happy enough with ipernity though mildly irritated by its minor quirks and, as it happens, still mostly happy with Flickr - until the next attack on its UI. Inevitably, ipernity has so far been used only for new uploads although the structure in place to add to albums from my massive library. Why do I do it? Simply because it is my legacy. I shall leave little in this world when I die. I am no great artist but my chosen role is that of documentary photogra…

Say 'Black & White" in the context of photography and you'll immediately be marshalling your views on the subject of endless debate. I used to be of the opinion that 'life is in colour, so why b&w?' I can say I have changed my view considerably to accommodate within my work a number of b&w shots with which I am very pleased. However, that it not why I am here today. The photographs we produce today contain infinite variations of colour (or not) and composition and deserve to be viewed in opti…

I am not sorry that I moved to ipernity although, for the time being, it is only my second home. A city boy will always be initially uncomfortable living in the country and Flickr's London still has an allure not matched in every way by the Cotswolds of ipernity. Although Flickr has its nosy neighbours and even, occasionally, burglars, it has community too in a way that large populations strangely do. Intuitively, the country should be the friendlier, safer place but, in the ipernity village, ev…

As I get used to ipernity, it becomes easier to add content at the same time as I am using other sites but still creates quite a workload. However, one begins to notice the little quirks, lack of refinement which I think ipernity could improve without spoiling the site. When I type in keywords, I want them to appear in a particular order because there is a logic in that order which takes the viewer through the elements of the photograph. When I type in several during the upload preparation, they…

A few days have passed since I started committing images to ipernity. It remains a haven from a Flickr which might not yet have stopped changing but those few days have been long enough to raise a few minor concerns. The lack of views is very tough after the breadth of the Flickr community. I find myself choosing - or not choosing - groups very carefully as I am not entirely happy with the content of some or the way some synopses are written. The mapping function is very odd too. The relative la…

When I saw this function in ipernity, I did not really know what to do with it as I already have a well-followed blog. I have now decided but reserve the right to change my mind. My 'articles' will be primarily about ipernity itself and my experiences there. Additionally, when an album deserves an accompanying article in addition to the album description, I shall write something which will be enthralling or a cure for insomnia, as you wish.

I arrived here in the migration of the disgruntled from Flickr in search of a place where I don't have to view my photographs on a black background. I am mostly content but still have to move from refugee status to citizen. The fact that the slower pace of life on ipernity reflects the better parts of old Flickr does not mean that it is perfect. For someone who produces a lot of images, something with the capabilities of Flickr's 'new' uploadr would be useful. Interaction with the map could also…