That's seems to be a nice place and even lots of people and the page itself looks familiar, it's not flickr...

So I'll not leave flickr and move cmpletely to this place, but I'll stay here too and post some picture. And maybe some day...

What does this mean? Just for curiosity a made blog search here on ipernity for 'flickr' and 'ipernity' and that's the result: There're more posts about flickr than ipernety on ipernity ;)

That leads me to the question if anyone has meet an ipernety member without an flickr account?

This is a very special webpage, mainly born out of the frustration about flickr, optically a clone between flickr and myspace (which makes it to a very interesting place, with good and useful features).

How will it procede? Will there ever be an ipernity live without having flickr mind, too?

We'll see...

What I like of course is this blogging function. I like the write down some thoughts, so this is nice feature. While I was with my girlfriend in Japan we wrote a quite succesfull blog about Japan and our life their. You can still find it here:

gunda-und-thomas-in-japan.typepad.com

Of course it's no longer up to date

What else I like? It's the statistics (sorry, but I'm a freak about this). Here I can see who when was watching which of my content. That's fine for me, but I fear that will lead to problems if ipernity grows.

The networking I like. It's really easy to see what's going on, finding new people. It's really fine how they managed all this.

A big plus is the reply function. Here I can now directly reply to comments and look for answers to my own comments. flickr has no comparable functionality.

Anything else is okay, it's a flickr clone, so the basic functionallity to share your pictures excists (sometimes I think they could have cloned to much, like the organizer thing, it really looks like a 1:1 copy, only with reduced functionality), the multimedia options are a nice add, especially the possibilty to upload videos wwould have been nice while I was in Japan. We made a lot of them and couldn't really share them

What did I miss? The internationallity, mainly this a home french people and german flickr refugees, but I miss it to see pictures from all over the world. I had contacts in North- and Soutamerica, in Asia, Australia and so on. I miss this really here...

And then I miss explore. Sorry, but I'm a little bit addictit to flickr's explore. I had a lot of pictures there and I like the resonance that this produce...

Beside that, resonance here is quit good, but manly produced by visits of old flickr contacts. But maybe that will improve...

I also miss the photo centered layout of flickr. When I move to a flickr homepage of someone I get a fast imoression of his work. That's not so easy here, it's too myspace like. Sorry, I prefere the clear, minimalsitic, white layout of flickr!

And some technically stuff: I'm a 'tag spammer', I hate flickr restriction to 75 tags, so more I hate the 20 tags limit here. It's afful!

Geottaging works not so well, or has someone found a possibilty to tag the pictures directly?

he recent activity page of flickr I really prefer. This one here is too caotic for me and I can not change the time I want to look back, or?

There some errors or even strange behaviours: Exploring tags gives allways less results than searching for pics by tags. For from flickr imported pics I couldn't change tags in the organizer. When I go back to the pic, the tags haven't changed. The messge counter is sometime not right, showing less or too much mails. And the tag cloud on the explore page doesn't fit.

That's not much, so mainly the page works very well.

Think I missed some aspects, but for the moment, that's all :)

It's interesting to see how fast ipernity is going to take over lots of flickr things. Even though we have no groups here, we have selfmade pseudogroups for certain pictures, we have the some photo contests here and, thanks Carsten, I'm using the same script for my vistor statistics...

We are like the old colonialists building up our 'New Flickr' on the newly dicoverd continent. Hey, where're the indigenous ipernity people, don't surrender!

Hi my dear new ipernity friends and ex-flickr members,

please forget your anger about flickr for a while a look here:

www.flickr.com/groups/temporary_gallery/

It's the temporary gallery, a great idea by ionushi and some others, giving one person the chance to present a collection of his images to a large audience for some while.

This week it's my time. So if you like my pictures go and have a look at them. To see them here, you'll have to wait some time.

So, take your chance!

Even though I took my first picture with my parents simple camera 30 years ago and got an SLR when I was 14 or so, I'm a pure amateur. The SLR was a Minolta camera with auto focus and anything else also automatic, and all the years I never switched the automatic off. That was pretty easy to get some snapshots on holidays, family parties and so on. Nothing really serious. That wasn't caused by an lack of interest in photography, but I'm not a very patient person... Taking pictures with different apertures and time, and then waiting days for the pictures is nothing that suits me. So there was no development and only a very poor output.

But something changed 7 years ago. With two friends, both passionated photographers, I went to Brazil. In ten days I took almost 400 pictures and the output was at least partly rather encouraging. First time I started to think a little bit more, when I took a picture. But still photography was only triggered by special events, in between nothing.

The next step was a short trip 2004 to Japan. There I bought a small Casio compact camera. And that was the right thing for me. I could take pictures, look what happened, i it okay or not. Trying something else, playing around with different settings and one could have it always in the bag to take a picture. So I and my girlfriend, she was affected by this little tool, too, went trough Berlin or somewhere else and took hundreds of pictures :)

The same year October we moved to Japan and then really increased a lot. In two years in Japan we took more than 20000 pictures, I think. Crazy, but true :)

And while taking all this pictures I started to see the limitations of the little Casio thing and noticed what it mean to have a SLR. The quality of my Minolta camera was much better. Just go to my flickr account, make a tag search for Casio and minolta and you'll see the difference. 

So what to do? being aware of limitations, starting to be a little bit ambiguous, and on the other hand still not satisfied with the analog work flow... I needed a DSLR! That's the solution, but such things are expensive. So I had to wait until my birthday last year when I presented me myself a Nikon DSLR. Know I could do what I wanted to do, but still not having learned how to do it...

A few months before my birthday I was looking for a solution to present our pictures from Japan on the our homepage. I was looking for some photo service having an API which I can use to present my pictures in a way I liked, while storing and organizing them somewhere else. And so I found flickr...

And sooner or later you will not only store pictures there, you started to look around, people are giving comments, choosing you as contact. So you see what is possible, and you're encouraged to try it out. It's fascinating: Colorful pictures, b&w, sepia, portraits and landscapes, macros, still life and action shots, all the variety of pictures I saw and started to try it while learning by doing. I bought some books and journals, looked around in the internet and so I learned a lot, but still I didn't how to do some pictures, but maybe I'll learn this some day, too, but it's a long way to go...

Meanwhile I quite satisfied with my current output. I think my photostream is really versatile, and very different people are enjoying my pics. But that's me, to specialize on one thing is nothing that suits me, always doing macro would certainly improve my skills on that, but I would stop it soon while being bored... So I'm trying everything, not perfect, but it's okay, at least for me. 

So I 'll go on, on flickr and here, showing my pictures, looking  what people  are thinking about them and learning...

One week ago I uploaded my first picture here on ipernity. It had the number 107381, my last picture I uploaded a few minutes ago, has the number 194863. S the number doubled in just a week. That sounds good!

Nearly the same if you look at 'Lea ipernity's' contacts. Now she has 5670 contacts, last week it was about 2000 less. So more and more flickr user come here. But the number of them I know, is almost constant now, but maybe that's clear, my German contacts are all here, the rest is maybe not so motivated to move.

A look at the number of blog posts reveals the same result as a few days ago: 663 about flickr, 650 about ipernity. flickr's shadow is long...

Personally, I think, I had a good start here. Having the low overall number of users in mind, nearly hundred people call me a contact. Thanks to all of you, my friends.

And I really appreciate all your visits, comments and votes. You are much more active, than on flickr (but still the overall hugh user number overthere leads to much more total response...). I think, that's mostly originated in the stronger networking component here on ipernity. You're much more aware of what's going on in your network and the comment reply function leads to more direct communication and interaction. At least for me, the motivation to answer comments is much higher, cause I know the other one will be informed about it. On flickr it's much harder to establish at least short dialogs with other members.

That's something I really like and leads to a genuine ipernity experience, something different from flickr. It's like having a large family or living in a small village, where you always know what's going on in the neighborhood.

So I think ipernity has good chances of a flowering future. Let's see what happens 

Hi friends!

Maybe I should also start a pseudo group. There's nothing for minimalistic shots, so post them here!

P.S.: Please small size only

P.P.S.: Think I need some invitation and comment code for promotion

So let's see...

That's for invitation:

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Hi! That's a excellent example of minimalistic photography.

Please join us at the minimalism pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/13975

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And that's for comments:

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Hi! That's a excellent example of minimalistic photography.

Saw this in the minimalism pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/13975

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So copy the code (you know, the stuff between the stars...) and then go commenting

... my old and new friends. I'll be back next week.

Enjoy this place, enjoy the pictures and have a good time!

P.S.: Love these smilies :)