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!

I’m sure your all pretty tired of hearing about this years POTY competition through Practical Photography magazine. We’ll you’ll be please to hear that this is officially the last post on the matter and that’s because it’s the final! Here’s how I ended up being one of the last six photographers that made it through to the final.

The rules for the final round are slightly different. The six finalists were asked to enter a set of three photographs under the theme ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’. So without further a do here are the images that I came up with:

As you can see I decided to go for a food themed interpretation of ‘the good, the bad and the ugly‘. I did this primarily because I wanted to continue the ‘home studio’ approach that had seen me through to the final and also because I was a little shoot on time due to a pending trip to the South West US (more on that later). So the upshot of the judging was that I came 5th out of the 6 entries. Of course I would have liked to have done better, but on reflection I’m pretty pleased to have made the final. A couple of hundred quids worth of Jessops vouchers made it all the sweeter as well! The other finalist can be seen here on Practical Photography Magazines’ website. I have to say I thought the winning three photos were just great and so original for the theme! The magazine article can be seen here. So it’s roll on next year and all the POTY 2010 competitions that will be up for grabs!

Round 2 of the competition saw 80 photographers move through to a themed round that would whittle the entries down to just 6. The theme was ‘long exposure, over 4 seconds’. To be honest I was short on time and a little short on ideas, until I saw a photo of some marbles on Flickr. My previous straws shot that got me into round 2 had been taken at home, so I decided the follow the ‘home studio’ route again.

To that end I came up with Electric Blue and I’m very pleased to say the judges saw fit to give me a grand final place. There were no prizes for round 2, but with nearly £5000 of Jessop’s vouchers up for grabs in the final there was all to shoot for.

The picture itself is just an arrangement of marbles on some fleece and the blue lines are a blue led key ring that I rotated around the marbles whilst the shutter was open. The exposure was around 4 seconds as per the requirement for the theme.

You will of course not be surprised to hear that my next post is likely to be all about the final and what happened there. You can see a screen shot of the magazine page here. There’s also a blog post on Photoanswers.co.uk (Practical Photography Magazines web site) about round 2 with commentary here.

In my previous post I mentioned some success I had last year in the Practical Photography Magazine 2008 Photographer of the Year competition. Spurred on by this I decided to enter the 2009 competition. The competition runs all year with the first round consisting of 8 themed rounds from which 10 photographers progress, leaving just 80 photographers from thousands of entries to progress to round 2.

Back in May this year I entered the 5th heat of round 1, which was the macro photography heat. I’m very pleased I took the trouble as I bagged first place with a shot of some drinking straws I’d taken a while before. Not only did I get the kudos of winning the heat, but also bagged myself a very nice Nikon D300 camera (thank you very much)! Being a Canon man this quickly lead to some EBay action, but the resulting funds were of course very welcome.

Keep an eye out for a post coming soon with details on how I did in round 2 of the competition. You can see a screen shot of the magazine page here. There’s also a blog post on Photoanswers.co.uk (Practical Photography Magazines web site) about the macro round results here.

Every year Practical Photography magazine hold a ‘Photographer of the Year’ competition that’s open to everyone and anyone around the World. The format has been the same for some time; there are 8 monthly themed rounds that each result in a winner and 9 runners-up progressing onwards. This means 80 photographers move through to round two and these are further whittled down to 6 photographers for a grand final.

Back in October 2008 I entered the Travel round, which happened to be the last of the 8 themed rounds. The photograph was a shot a took in Thailand in June 2008 of a dilapidated house by the side of the Thonburi canals that run through Bangkok.

The actual shot entered into the competition was a sepia toned version of the one entered here. The competition wasn’t only significant because I was one of only eighty photographers (from thousands of entries) to progress to the next round, but it represented the first time that one of my photographs had been seen ‘in-print’. You can see a screen shot of the magazine page here.

Unfortunately I didn’t progress further than round two in the 2008 competition, but it did give me the impetus to enter the 2009 incarnation that brought considerably more success. Keep an eye our for news on that to follow……

ImageArcade was originally build using the Black Canvas theme for WordPress from StudioPress.  The themes aren’t free, but for a few of your hard earned notes you get a professionally designed theme and the support from the forum is brilliant.  I’d recomend them to anyone looking at using WordPress.

Now ImageArcade has had a fair amount of customisation over and above the standard Black Canvas theme applied to it and a lot of time and love as well.  So here’s the point of this news post……  The team over at StudioPress have taken a look at ImageArcade and seen fit to add it to their ’showcase’ section to show what can be done with their themes.

I get a lot of traffic to the site direct from the showcase section so a big thank you to all the guys and girls at StudioPress for doing that!

If you’d like to see ImageArcade in the showcase section then take a look here: – ImageArcade Showcase!

So here we have it; the news and blog section for ImageArcade.

Initially the order of the posts may look a little strange as I’m intending to add a few historical pieces of news, but things should begin to look a little more normal as time moves on. 

The intention is to post anything that seems relevant at the time, or perhaps just anything at all. Of course I’d be more than happy to here any of you thoughts on any of the posts, so please feel free to leave a comment or two!