Photos of the Year

Piers Cawley — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 12:10:00 -0600

Last Friday, The Guardian indulged in a bit of crowd sourcing. They invited readers to contribute snapshots that summed up the year and assembled them into a feature in the G2 section. The next day, in the magazine, they put together a similar feature using professional press photos.

It’s instructive to compare the two features: Guardian readers take ‘snapshots’, professionals take ‘photographs’. Readers’ pictures are surrounded by white space on (high quality) news print. Professionals get printed full bleed on glossy paper in the magazine. Readers’ images are small scale and personal, the professional work chosen is all about the big picture. Professionals frame shots way better, and as a rule their shots are better composed (but there are images in the readers’ section that would live very happily in the center spread of the main paper. For example, there’s a beautifully seen and composed image of a football fan lying passed out alongside a statue outside Liverpool Street station). To my eye at least, the readers’ work is as good as the professionals’ stuff in the glossy magazine; the readers’ concerns are different from those of a news photographer, but they’re at least as important

The readers’ year feature is a nationally published, print version of what we’re trying to do at Onsite Picture Desk – taking a pictures from multiple sources and using them to tell your story. The Guardian editors who put their feature together show just how good this kind of feature can be.

My photo of the year

Of course, the other thing that came to my mind when I read the article was “If I’d noticed the guardian asking for these photographs, which one of my photographs sums up 2006 for me?”

After a few moments thought, this one jumped out:

It’s of my parents, taken at Easter. They’re sitting in the orchard of the medieval water mill they’ve lived in for the last 27 years. They’re watching my brother’s kids running about the place.

Some time in 2007, they will sell the house to my brother and move to a modern house about 200 yards away. We joke about it, and it makes sense, the village is a great place for the kids to grow up, and the mill is a fantastic place to live, but it must be a fantastic wrench for them.

What about you?

Since this is such a new blog, I doubt I’ve got many readers, but do you have a photo that sums up 2006 for you? Comment and let me know.

Going Live...

Piers Cawley — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 17:45:00 -0600

Why does stuff that takes ages seem so sudden? One minute I’m canvassing friends and family about my idea for a new business and the next I’ve got business cards printed registered the domain, got the site live, written a bit of marketing copy and started scratching my head about what should go in this first post on the blog side of things.

For my next trick, I need to do some sums and work out what I should be charging for my services, write or find some appropriate slideshow software, get the galleries tab working, sort out some way of automating print sales and generally continue getting my act together. Interesting times.

Which is probably another way of saying that you shouldn’t expect this to be a hugely active blog in the immediate future but hey, watch this space anyway.