A section for occasional articles, personal comment, groans and random thoughts, appertaining to various matters that are either directly or loosely connected with wildlife photography and the content of this website; hence ‘musings’, which is a far more appropriate title than calling it a 'blog' page.
Creating a varied wildlife photo portfolio ....
08 March 2020 | what makes a good wildlife picture - part 3
In this article, which is the third in my six-part series about making good wildlife pictures, I'd like to share my thoughts about the way I categorise photos when I want to create a varied portfolio of shots. It’s a simple process for determining the make-up of the photo rather than the composition, which help me put together a good mix of photos in order to produce more interesting website albums or selections for posting to Flickr or Instagram.
The basic requirements of a wildlife image ....
16 February 2020 | what makes a good wildlife picture - part 2
In this second part of the series about the making of a good wildlife picture, I want to run through some of the basic requirements that will generally need to be met by any image that is going to find its way off my hard-drive to be shared or seen by others.
Some personal thoughts about what makes a good wildlife picture ....
12 February 2020 | what makes a good wildlife picture - part 1
This is the first in a planned six-part series of articles where I’m going to discuss some of the aspects and compositional requirements that I personally look for in my photography. I fully accept that the subject line of ‘what makes a good wildlife picture’ is going to be very subjective. And so it should be, as photography from any genre or of any style is an art form and, as such, is naturally going to be interpreted and appreciated in many different ways. These are simply my thoughts on the matter ….
Refining my rating system for easier selections of similar images ....
01 February 2020 | refining my rating system
In my last post I discussed the way that I’m now star-rating my wildlife images to ensure that I have a consistent system. The adopted procedure works well except when I’m looking at a number of similar photos from a sequence and where I want to be able to quickly identify the ‘best-of-the-bunch’.
A small refinement of the system has overcome the problem.
My take on having defined criteria for rating wildlife images ....
26 January 2020 | rating wildlife images
During a year end review of my Lightroom catalog I realised that despite having a robust and well thought-out ‘library’ module system for filing and finding my wildlife images, there was one particular aspect of the overall process where I’d become rather inconsistent, which was with the application of star ratings. In order to work properly with a new workflow system that I’ve started to use, I decided that it was about time that I had some rules, or guidelines if you like, to help me maintain some level of consistency moving forward.
Accepting a smartphone's role in present-day photography ....
30 September 2019 | smartphones
My long-held personal feelings towards viewing photos on a mobile and the use of smartphones generally for photography have changed somewhat over the past few weeks, simply because I decided to pull my head out of the sand to take a better, and more open-minded, look at the way the devices are being used.
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Producing a 'mobile friendly' SEO compliant website ....
27 August 2019 | optimising for mobile
Following on from my previous post, it seems to me that in today’s technology-dependent world you’re penalised to some degree if you have an internet presence that isn’t ‘mobile friendly’. Even a personal, non-commercial website like this one needs to fulfil certain SEO requirements in order to survive, and to be listed and found on Google. I discovered this the hard way when I lost my original site, and must learn from the experience and accept that more websites are now viewed on a mobile than a computer.
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The creation, demise and reincarnation of a website ....
05 August 2019 | website history
The original ’tickspics' website was over four years in the making before finally going live in 2017, and was then only operational for just over a year before it was effectively killed off by an unwanted system update. It was an upsetting experience, but like the proverbial 'phoenix rising from the ashes' the website has survived; reincarnated in a new form and on a new platform. Admittedly, this post is more of a personal reminder of the sequence of events, but I thought that writing a bit about the website history would be a good way of starting this new section.
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