5 Years and 6 South Australian Photo-Groups on Flickr

2011 may be my final year displaying photography upon Flickr.

I’ve been adding selections of my photography since early 2006, and I can actually remember shooting photographs around the back of nearby shopping centres, deliberately setting up shots specifically for adding to my Flickr portfolio. I even added scanned negatives of my photographs from the 198? Adelaide GrandPrix that includes Jimmy Barnes, Johnny Diesel plus one of the TinLids. Anyone remember them?

I have planned to add our photographs from our 2001 holiday to New Zealand – which will mean scanning in over 400 photographs shot on a Canon 500D film camera!

What I have enjoyed most about being a part of flickr is the South Australian people I have met and befriended during MeetUps and exhibitions. Check out the six groups that have had the biggest influence upon my photographic direction:

1. SA Central

This is where I first connected with a lot of interesting photographers living in Adelaide. Back in the early days we all met about 3 times a year, often hastily or with very-long threads about the location and timing. Whilst exhausting, it worked.
It’s also the group that got me most interested in being in a photo exhibition. I was one of the participants in the July 5th 2007 FlickrSA ‘Refuge’ exhibition. I learnt a lot that year, particularly about image size, both in dimensions and DPI/PPI. I now print at 20×16″ at a minimum! Thanks to the people who pushed me that year, I have now appeared in 2 more exhibitions!

2. Adelaide Central Market

Whilst I have not yet been able to dare myself to fire my camera in such a public place, I would like to take a walk through there when nobody is around. Soon. Maybe in 2011. I love the work shot by fellow South-Aussies who have no qualms about shooting fruit and vegetables.

3. Architectural Architecture and Landscape

One of my biggest passions is Architecture. South Australia is filled with historic homes, churches, warehouses and multi-storey offices that are being encroached upon by modern concrete, glass and steel monstrosities. So we shoot to show the history and future of Adelaide’s city skyline

4. Adelaide

I’m in this group because their mantra is “If you know what Farmer’s Union, a Pie Floater, Johnny the Aboriginal or Fritz are, you probably belong to us.“ I have lived and worked in South Australia here since 1986. I’ve visited many places around Australia, yet I come back every time.

5. All in Adelaide

For those of us who spend a lot of time in and around Adelaide, this group enables us to show off precisely what we see and find everywhere we visit.

6. South Australian Weather

Throughout the year, South Australians endure all kinds of weather. Sometimes all in one day.
We’ve seen droughts that drive farmers to insanity, floods that have destroyed crops moments away from picking, fires that have destroyed a landscape one day only to revitalise it by the following year, thunderstorms that wreak havoc upon flowering gardens, turning them into mud holes. This group helps to show you every possible scenario that mother nature can throw at us … and still we go on. Photography makes the perfect record of what man can endure.

But a few nights ago I discovered that flickr has changed its payment system. Whilst others might applaud Yahoo! for acquiring Flickr, I am yet to be happy. The payment method for upgrading PRO-accounts seems to have gone backwards not forwards. My form-of-payment seems unwanted, and I don’t have many other methods for paying for goods online. Deducting 1-cent from my accounts to prove I am real is not an ordeal I enjoy having to go through. (Disclaimer: Which isn’t to say I won’t, I just don’t like it!)

On the upside: For the last three years my primary focus changed to Redbubble where I continue to submit the best of the best of my photo-artwork, where I continue to be the head-moderator for the ‘Art of South Australia’, plus where I find myself more comfortable.
But I still need Flickr, there’s no denying it. Flickr is where I add work that I want the world to appreciate the interesting places around Adelaide, the abstract and the eclectic that need not a dollar-value to be appreciated. It’s where I show everyone that there is art in everything and everything has some intrinsic value, despite its ugliness.

Flickr enables artists to stop from getting overly big-headed about their photo-skills, brings them back down to earth when they see how the rest of the world lives yet continue to photograph their worlds. Which is why I’ll ride this wave for now until it all gets sorted out. I won’t be leaving Flickr just yet. I hope.

Postscript: Photographs from my side of the universe…