Photography, not cameras

Let's start this off with a confession: like many people in the photography-world I am a bit of a gearhead. After all: who doesn't like shiny new things, really good industrial design and so forth? But this is not what it is supposed to about: photography is - in my mind - meant to be a creative endeavor rather then a game of technical optimization. Sure there is room for both but all to often the technical side dominates everything, even images posted on interned forums are mainly looked at for aspect such as sharpness, any vignette that might be visible, grain/noise, need I go on? Instead we might all be better off to assume that the technical side is the way it was intended, unless we are asked for feedback on this, and look at/talk about the actual image.

A random photograph to make this less dry

Talking about images is of course way more difficult then talking about technlogy: no more easy answers on right or wrong, no more technical measurement of what is "better". Instead very personal reasoning of what is good or bad needs to be expressed in an understandable and relatable way.

Let's create a place for this

There used to be a few pleasant little places on the web for this kind of talk. The kind of small internet-forums where people would comment on each others images in a positive and constructive manner, where technical talk can be about personal experiences with a given piece of kit and not about specs that you can look up at whatever the favorite review-site of the day is. So does this not exist or do I simply not know about it? Even if does exist there may be room for more then one such place: after all, in the age of internet giants like facebook there is a certain charm to the small tight-knit community off somewhere in its own corner of the web. One might even say those are essential for keeping the web to be dominated even more by large social networks.

In my mind the classicel internet forum is an ideal platform for this kind of undertaking: it provides a well more understandable way of making content accessable to everone interesten then the ever more strange "activity feeds" of the social networks that are being presented to us sorted in some way nobody who has not spend a lot of time researching understands. How about a simple chronological order that gives you the option to find something again and now if somebody has replied to a thread after you have last looked at it from the overview?

Software of choice

My current contenders are FluxBB and Flarum, with Flarum being slightly in the lead because I feel like trying something a little different. Flarum takes a lot of its clues from Discourse (a software I find really interesting) while being build in php, something that as quite an advantage for me as a php-developer. With the forum software covered a thing that remains is image-hosting as flarum does not natively support uploading images to the forum server when posting, also in the long rund you end up with a lot of data this way - keep in mind all this has to also be backed-up.

Do stand by for further announcements

This project is actually already quite far along, so in a few days you should see an update with a link to what I am up to regarding this whole thing. In the meantime there is still some stuff I have to go through and some smaller things to decide. So there might be a post about that as well.