Fictions Abound is a two day photography conference organised by Ffotogallery and the University of Wales in association with the Chapter Arts Centre. Running in the Chapter Arts Centre - Cardiff.
What’s it about? The changing role of photography in current photographic practice. It takes the idea of the ‘mockumentary’ and will use it try to explore the relationship between the photographers of today and the past with reality and the world we live in.
Given the vast numbers of photographs being taken now that we have seen the rise of digital photography and cameras in almost every pocket in the form of a mobile phone this is an interesting subject for debate.
For more information take a look at http://www.chapter.org/.
If you are interested then move quickly - this conference runs from March the 3rd to March the 4th 2006.
Are you interested in free and easy to use image editing software? Well if so then take a look at the Bellamax Website. For a limited period of three months Bellamax are offering their new image editing product free to beta testers. To become a beta tester - sign up with them, and when it is ready you will be given a link to download the program. At this point it looks as if it will offer simple tools for frequent tasks such as red-eye and colour correction. Also promised is an ability to plug-in into the most popular photo-sharing web sites. Giving you a natural work flow of checking, adjusting and then uploading.
If any readers do end as beta testers - we’d love to see a review from you.
Google the search engine that will be ubiquitous is offering free web pages via it’s new Page Creator. The project still in beta offers the ability to easily create your own webpage - tied to the name of a Google mail account.
Although online web page building is far from new, the sheer size of Googles presence on the web is bound to make this an interesting endeavour.
From a creative point of view - this could become part of a useful marketing tool kit for anyone endeavouring to gain attention for their own projects.
The journal and magazine section is a little different to Shared Creation Projects. Projects is an open invite to all to post. The Journal and Magazine has stricter editorial controls. That’s simply because Projects is all about getting attention to yourself and the magazine is all about well informed news and articles.
To write for the magazine you first need to register. It uses a separate login to emphasise the big difference in the two sections of Shared Creation. Once registered you have the right to comment on posts and right to create your own entries. You do not automatically gain the right to publish. All your posts are passed to an editor. The editor will either approve and publish the post; or note any problems preventing it’s publication. It then becomes a collaborative document between you and the editor; once it is o.k. it will be published.
When you have been published you are on a fast-track to becoming your own publisher. You will gain that right after you have had three entries published in Shared Creation.
There is of course one more question you might have; what is in it for you? In the short term only the thrill of posting and all publicity you can gain from it. In the long term there are plans to pay our writers - based on how many articles they have published.
So do it for fun, do it get your name known, and ultimately maybe money.
Membership to the Shared Creation - Journal and Magazine is of course free.
We’ve just become aware of a new image cataloguing and managing system. It’s called Imgseek and works in a very interesting way. In order to find images in a collection managed by ImgSeek you have to provide a sketch or a reference picture.
It will then use that to find comparable pictures. This is quite a far departure from the usual practices of arranging images into galleries, contact sheets, or tagging images in order to make them easier to find.
Meanwhile on the tagging front Imgseek has a web based version that can help you find pictures on the net.
We’ve not reviewed this yet, but it seems to be a very interesting new combination of image management and social networking. The client version of Imgseek is available for a number of operating systems including both Windows and Mac versions.
