Ok, so it’s likely that you were hoping this post was about something other than photographic exhibitions? Sorry, it’s not about the arguably (but only arguably!) more interesting subject of baring all, but firmly about the concept of showing off your photos in an exhibition, but is there more to it than a few not very interesting photos on a rarely visited public library wall?

As you may have seen over on my bio page I was introduced into photography by my father and I’ve long known and heard about is exploits in local, national and even international photography exhibitions, but it’s only recently that I’ve been becoming more involved myself. Now it’s fair to say that most of us are unlikely to have a full photographic exhibition at MOMA or the Tate Modern, but there are some more realistic targets out there, as I’ve been finding out!

There are plenty of armature and professional photographic bodies and federations in existence (The Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique (FIAP), New York Press Photographers Association (NYPPA) to name three of the hundreds out there), but the one I’ve been paying most attention to recently it the [Photographic Society of America] (PSA). The PSA is armature run international society, obviously based out of the USA. The crux of their ‘mission’ is to bring people together, help them better their photography, have fun and ultimately gain recognition for their achievements in photography.

The PSA run an annual exhibition, which is open to anyone. The exhibition is split into various photographic genres and every picture is judged and marked. Very roughly the best 20% of entries are accepted into the exhibition and the very cream of the crop receive an award. However, the PSA’s influence extends much further than a single annual exhibition, because they provide accreditation to other exhibitions all over the World. This means that smaller clubs/groups etc can apply to have their exhibitions accredited and as a result there are stacks of exhibitions all year round to enter and pit yourself against your peers. Furthermore the PSA run a recognition scheme based around the number of pictures you have had accepted into accredited international exhibitions. Each collection of acceptances earns you a star-award in your chosen genre and multiple star-awards add-up to larger overall awards.

I can imagine some people reading this and thinking ‘what’s the point’? I think the answer to that is simple ‘some people like this sort of thing and some don’t’. Some people are happy taking pictures for themselves alone, which is no more or less valid. For me the anticipation of seeing whether your pictures have made the ‘cut’ and the on-going focus that it provides is great. Whether you enter the exhibitions or not the PSA is a great organisation and I’d encourage all (armature particularly) photographers to join and see where it leads you; it’s cheap, provides you a monthly magazine, which though basic is very informative and provides access to many learning resources to improve your photography.

Every now and again (well pretty often to be honest) I receive an email from someone who’s seen ImageArcade and has a question related to how it’s been constructed, how I’ve done x or who did y etc. I like to help people out and try to reply to all these mails, however, to save myself a bit of time here’s a quick guide to some of the most common questions. Oh and if your mail goes something like “great site; please can you send me all the code and help me build my site totally free?” then as nice as it is to receive complements you might not get a reply

The Basics

ImageArcade is built using WordPress. WordPress is a free blog and general CMS authoring tool that runs on PHP. It’s quick and easy to get up and running and is incredibly flexible and scalable. After all the WordPress site is built on WordPress itself and receives more hits than ImageArcade will ever get (well you never know!). The idea is that you can take a ‘theme’ (there are tens of thousands of them out there), apply it to your WordPress installation and away you go. ImageArcade originally used the Black Canvas theme from StudioPress (see here) as well).

Taking WordPress A Step Further

Once you have some content on your site and you’ve learnt your way around WordPress you’ll want to start customising the site over and above what the pre-defined template offers. The first thing to do here is make sure you understand the template structure of the theme you’re working with. Once you have an understanding of this and some basic PHP knowledge you’ll be able to make changes to different areas of your site to get the design that you want. There are thousands of plug-ins built for WordPress that allow you to add additional functionality with little or no changes in PHP or to your template files.

Adding The Nice Touches

The most common questions I receive are related to the nice graphical and interactive features on the site, for example the image rotator on the home-page or the fish-eye menu on the portfolio page. These are all achieved with JQuery. JQuery is a library of commands and functions that are written in JavaScript; web developers can use these functions and libraries to create simple yet very effective tools to cover many usage scenarios. These tools are generally packaged as ‘plug-ins’ and whilst they are not the same as actual WordPress plug-ins and do require some css and php coding, as a general rule they are quick to pickup and often work in very similar fashion to each other. Below is a list of some JQuery plug-ins that are used on ImageArcade or that I’ve seen and thought worthy of a mention.

• Image Rotator: – As used on the home-page for the featured images.
• Fish Eye Menu: – As used on the portfolio page for the gallery links.
• Shadowbox Overlay: – Used throughout the site to zoom into single images and grey-out the background.
• Accordion Menu: – Used for the menu in the right side-bar.
• Simple Viewer: – Slightly different in that this is a Flash based plug-in. It’s utilised for the ‘quick-galleries’ on the site.
• Galleriffic Gallery: – Used for the gallery pages.

My business background has been related (although not directly) to web development for the last ten years. This has undoubtedly helped me in producing ImageArcade, but WordPress and associated extensions aren’t a difficult technology to learn. If you invest a little time in them then you’ll get the reward pretty quickly.

If you need coding help with a project, or feel that I may be able to offer something to a project (be it photographic of not) that your involved with then shoot on over to the contact page and drop me an email!

Checkout the links page here also!

In early January 2010, after a long journey, myself and my girlfriend landed back in Manchester, UK. We’d been for a great three week tour/holiday to Mumbai (Bombay) and Kerala in the South West of India. Take a look here for the full quick-gallery of the snaps.

We’d both been to India before (myself several times with work), but never to this area and never for a 100% holiday either! Having flown via Istanbul to Mumbai (by the way don’t bother flying this route with Turkish Airlines) we had a quick night stop over at Juhu Beach close to the airport. The next morning we took an internal flight down to Cochin in Kerala. After a stopover in the very nice Bounty Yatra, Bounty Yatra in Fort Cochin we headed out on a pre-planned tour of Kerala:

• Day 01: Cochin – Munnar Pic
• Day 02: Munnar Pic
• Day 03: Munnar – Thekkady Pic
• Day 04: Thekkady Pic
• Day 05: Thekkady Pic
• Day 06: Thekkady – Varkala Pic
• Day 07: Varkala – Alleppey Pic
• Day 08: Alleppey – Cochin Pic

To say our Keralan tour was great would be something of an understatement. There were so many fun parts and they feel all that much better as soon as you land back in the snow covered UK in the middle of Winder; the transition from 35 Celsius above to 5 below in the space of a few hours it pretty tough!). The only disappointment was whilst tracking elephants in the jungle in Periyar national park; despite hearing them close by and seeing plenty of the not so small evidence that fleeting glimpse evaded us.

After a final night in Ernakulam (close to the airport in Cochin) we boarded the return internal flight back to Mumbai. Once settled into our bargain (well not such a bargain) basement hotel, which was annoyingly situated right behind the rather more up market Taj Hotel we set about exploring Mumbai. In all we had 3 nights and 4 full days, which was just about right to see all the main sites. The city itself is such a crazy and busy place, which is great, but very tiring at the same time. Particular highlights for us were the general ‘buzz’ of the city along with just walking around and taking it all in. Chowpatty Beach was brilliant place to just sit down and watch the World go by.

So would we go back? Well of course we would. We don’t tend to go to the same place time and time again, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of things to do, see or photograph anywhere in India, it’s a first class photographic destination!