Supercargo's blog/

Face

Dear fellow Ipernauts!

About a month ago I made the decision to try to be more sociable on this site. I joined Ipernity from the F-site-that-shall-not-be-named during the great censorship controversy of 2006, and I've not regretted it. Although I've built up a small network of people I like to think of as close neighbours, I've not made great efforts to use Ipernity as a social site. This summer I decided to try to change my ways.

My decision is linked with others: I am exploring other social sites (Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed). and I've started blogging about my experiences - I'll add links here to those blogs in time.

Added to this, though, I've recently met a few different people, new on Ipernity, who seem to be asking about the site partly in terms of its social networking capacity. (I'm thinking in particular of Busterkeaton's blog entry ipernity versus flickr - he used the forbidden word! - and Albtraum's blog entry Netiquette.) Trying to answer them, I found myself thinking more about Ipernity as a social networking site.

My favourite mermaid

Previously, what I've done here in terms of being sociable is to try to visit everyone who visits me, comment on a picture or two on their site, leave a message in their guestbook, favourite photos I really like. Occasonally I managed to visit some of my neighbours, and sometimes I browsed my favourites. But I have often not been on Ipernity for more than an hour or so, once a week or even once a month, so doing any of this has not been so regular.

As part of my new effort to be more sociable, from the middle of June, I have started a project to post one photo every day for a year to the Sverige, Suede, Sweden group. This means I have to visit Ipernity at least once every 24 hours, and I hope that will make me spend a bit of time here, so I can visit other people's sites even without being invited. If not every day, then at least every few days.

Faces in the crowd 2

About the same time that I started posting to the Sverige group, one of my neighbours, Wickerl invited me to be a moderator on the No Limit group. I don't think I've ever posted anything to this group as I've not worked out what it's for yet. (Unless it just wants to break a record? Anyone who can enlighten me?) Anyway, just this group seems very difficult for me to fit into my scheme of things. I am trying, though, to post to the other groups I'm a member of, and to visit them more frequently too.

I've seen that there have been physical Ipernity meetings where photographers on Ipernity get together in a place and take a photographic expedition. I'd be interested to join in such a meeting sometime. I don't know whether there is any central planning for these meetings though. Can anyone advise?

John with drink

Well, I written far more than usual here and probably far more than necessary, so I'll close here. If you've read through this, thanks. Please feel free to drop me a line, write in my guest book or visit my gallery! (Och du får gärna skriva på svenska om du känna dig säkrare på det språk!)

I hope to meet you soon, at least virtually!

John

New Notebook

I have recently become the owner of an ultra portable netbook. I'm going to be taking it with me in order (I hope) to keep in touch while I'm travelling in England and around Sweden in the coming year. The screen image doesn't seem to have a great deal of colour depth - so i am not planning to use it to do a lot of photo editing, but I shall want to do some - so what programme to use?

Normally, I use Photoshop and normally I don't do much in the way of tweaking the pictures I take. Mostly I do some cropping, some contrast adjustments, some colour adjustments and I alter the size of the photos down to approximately 96dpi for Creative Commons licensed pictures.

Warehouse door

Through the open window

Photoshop is expensive to run (legally) on another machine, so I thought I'd try Gimp, which is open source image editing and image creating software available from the GNU Image Manipulation Project here: http://www.gimp.org

Skara King

So far I've not tested Gimp extensively, but the tests I have run simulate the sort of things I think I'm most likely to use the software for. Of the pics I've used Gimp for, I've posted three pictures to one of my blogs and one picture here to Ipernity.Now I've published these four, spliced with Photoshop processed versions of the same pictures.

See what you think!

Dear All,

Having made various promises about being social on Ipernity (http://www.ipernity.com/blog/supercargo/165241), circumstances have confounded me. I'm travelling in England at the moment, and despite having a fine, new (very nearly) state of the art netbook (http://www.ipernity.com/blog/supercargo/165917), the available technlogy in Britain to connect to the Internet has been less than satisfactory.

Wallander 1

Here's a tip - if you want to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile internet connection in Britain, DON'T buy T-Mobile. Or if you do, get someone in the shop where you buy it to install it on your computer, because otherwise you risk finding yourself, like me, forced to make expensive mobile telephone calls to rings of automated answering messages round and around till you can find a human being to talk to. Then, if you are really lucky, it might be someone who speaks English in an accent you understand and who can actually help you with your problem.

But I don't want to complain. Really!

Award winning beach

I've been here a week now, around in London, to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition among other places, and down to my home town (Brighton). A walk along the sea front in the face of a warm, pre-storm wind brought back happy childhood memories. Brighton beach (and indeed Hove next door) is made up of shingle - hundreds of thousands of small stones. Brighton tourist authority still has its publicity photos taken from far enough away so it looks at first sight like the beaches are sand!

I've met up with old friends and long-lost relatives, and I'm off to see my mother in Northampton later this week and down to Salisbury in Wiltshire tomorrow to visit the cathedral there. Some photos I hope to complement my recent pictures made in the Cathedral at Skara.

I've also been on the look-out for photos in England that I can reasonably add to the Sverige, Suede, Sweden group. I had planned to add a new photo there every day of the week for a year and I was managing quite well until I came to England and ran into the technical problems I mentioned above. Plus some others I can't blame T-Mobile for. Still, with the help of Léa d'Ipernity (Big THANKS, Léa! :-) ) I seem to have a functioning work-around now. So, I'm catching up ...

Wallander 2

Last night - amazingly - the BBC broadcast a Swedish language TV film based on the Henning Mankell detective books about Kurt Wallander and Ystad. I snapped that and have added two pictures to the Sverige, Suede, Sweden group for yesterday and today. More Sweden-in-England pictures to come!

Well, enough of this rambling.

Cheerio for now!
John (aka Supercargo)