Maine Photo News

Maine Photographers and Photography

[mainephotonews]

2015 Calendars

Crown of Maine Aroostook calendar

Maine Imaging's Maine Geographic calendar with sunrises, sunsets, moon phases, and tides

Charlie Widdis: 2015 Landscape Photography Calendar

Cynthia Farr-Weinfeld: A Year in Maine: 2015

Corey Templeton: 2015 Portland, Maine Calendar

Benjamin Williamson: Maine 2015

Katherine Gendreau: 2015 Lighthouse Calendar

Adam Woodworth: 2015 Astrophotography Calendar

Alana Ranney: 2015 Pet Portrait Calendar

I'm sure I missed some people. Are you a Maine photographer? Do you have a calendar? Let me know.

[mainephotonews]

Call for calendars

Last year I bought three calendars from local photographers (Corey Templeton, Cindy Farr-Weinfeld, and Katherine Gendreau). They were all fantastic.

This year I'd like to get more.

If you're producing a 2015 calendar, please let me know with a comment on this post. I'd love to gather up links to as many local photographer calendars as possible for a future post.

Thanks!

[mainemike]

[mainephotonews]

Reblog: mainemike:

Pineland Gardens, New Gloucester, ME

[coreysomething-deactivated20251]

[mainephotonews]

Reblog from coreysomething.

[seanalonzoharris]

Editorial for Down East magazine. The last of the shakers.

[mainephotonews]

I was sorry to hear that The Aroostook F-Stops photography club is shutting down.

[coreysomething-deactivated20251]

Portland Public Library on Flickr.

[mainemike]

A scene from the garden, Portland, ME

[mainephotonews]

Finding new friends in Flickr through Favorites feeds

There are a lot of ways to find new photographers through Flickr. Here's a technique I like to use to build out a network of people who know and follow each other. I find it a little more communal than just following random people with pictures in Explore or from random Flickr promotional galleries. Here's how it works:

RSS feed readers like Feedly and Reeder (and formerly Google Reader) make it easy to stay updated with sites like Flickr that provide an RSS feed for every member's photostream. But less well-known is that Flickr also provides a feed for each member's favorited photos, so you can see what sort of images people you follow are into. People often add favorites from the people they follow, so they are essentially helping you find the most interesting people out of everyone they follow.

To find a favorites feed, go to someone's photostream, like Jason Philbrook's. Click on the Favorites link at the top.

On the Favorites page, there's a link at the very bottom: Subscribe to philbrookjason's favorites. You can then add that link to your feed reader, and see new pictures as they are added to his Favorites.

I've done this with everyone I follow on Flickr, and it's helped me find many more people with interesting photos than I otherwise would. It multiplies my own stream of potential favorites by the number of people I follow, and it's led me to find links between people I already know and great new people to follow.

(Minor tech-nerd complaint: to get to that Subscribe to favorites link, you have to scroll through many pages of Favorites that autoload as you scroll down. It's like playing whack-a-mole. The link would be much easier to use if it was at the top. And an even nerdier complaint: Flickr does not put a good link element in the HTML header of the Favorites page, so feed readers can't discover the feed automatically on its own. Oh well. For me, it's worth the extra effort to do the scrolling and manual subscribing.)

[coreysomething-deactivated20251]

[mainephotonews]

I love the details in this shot from Corey Templeton.

[mainephotonews]

Flickr recommendation: Check out Michael Beland's photostream for great nature and landscape shots.

[mainemike]

Honeybee and Goldenrod

[mainephotonews]

Flickr recommendation: Check out John Dana's Flickr photostream, currently loaded with vivid blues and greens from nature.

[mainephotonews]

Troy R. Bennett has a nice slideshow of bug macros on bangordailynews.com.

[mainephotonews]

The Beacon in Blue by Jessie.Briggs on Flickr.

I'm a sucker for a good Portland Head Light image. I love the color and mood of this one by Jessie Briggs.

[mainephotonews]

A non-Maine article from Joe McNally. It starts off as a nice lighting lesson, but closes with wisdom about the business side of news photography:

Too often now, the excellence of photo technology preempts the understanding that there is knowledge and experience needed to put that formidable technology to good use. The game of making pictures is not an exercise in automation and pixels, but a decidedly human enterprise, rife with calculations and enterprise even the priciest camera cannot enact. Sending reporters with Iphones out into the world as a means of cutting through the expensive underbrush of publishing is not an answer.

This isn't limited to news photography, or even photography at all. I'm reminded of another quote I've saved for a long time:

The notion that technology can supplant incompetence is upon us in all sorts of endeavors, including that of shooting.

From Jeff Cooper, The Art of the Rifle.

[mainephotonews]

Patrick Downey is this month's featured artist on Berlin City's Easy Inspiration artist series.

(I'm not sure why the great truck photos from Patrick's Facebook page aren't on the Berlin City blog post - maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?)