After a few months of sorting through my photographs — and a fair bit of editing — I have completed the slow migration from arcade.withoutnations.com to my account at Flickr. There are a few reasons I felt this was necessary:

1. Gallery is a wonderful, robust open-source platform for hosting and sharing photographs on a personal website. Unfortunately, the larger the database gets the slower it runs. The interface, while infinitely customizable, isn’t particularly user-friendly (an aside: the beta for 3.0 looks very promising, and I would encourage others to give it a try). Flickr exists to host and transfer tremendous amounts of data to users quickly.
2. The social networking aspects of Flickr are unparalleled and steadily growing. Flickr can be seamlessly woven into dozens of applications and services — and where a gap exists, an API sits ready.
3. The community at Flickr. As I connect with others and add contacts, I am committing myself to a community that encourages sharing and networking. Hosted here, I am only responsible to myself. Two years passed as I delayed uploading photos from my trips to Europe. With a firm deadline and the knowledge that people will be actively viewing new images, I pushed through and finally finished what I started.
4. A simple, transparent method for implementing Creative Commons licensing.

The first attempt at integration with this site will be via the Flickr Gallery plugin by Dan Coulter. There seems to be quite a few options out of the box, but it also looks to have excellent support for the Flickr API search method, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

The existing albums at arcade will remain live indefinitely. I was less selective when posting photos to Gallery, so there may be value in the additional images that haven’t been migrated.

Churchyard, Covent Garden. 2008

Pigeon from Mark Mitchell on Vimeo.

A short clip of fireworks on the weekend following Guy Fawkes Day, filmed from the front window of my flat. Optical zoom on Panasonic DMC-TZ3. More clips soon

Guy Fawkes Day from Mark Mitchell on Vimeo.

The business cards I ordered from Moo arrived today. Considering they have been digitally printed, the quality is certainly good for the price. I particularly like the recycled card stock, a very subtle smooth texture with a visible grain. The design was rushed out this weekend in the hopes that they would be delivered in time for Glug — which I’ll be attending tonight. Selecting Caecilia for the typography was smart, and the color actually matches what I intended. Next time I order though I’ll make sure to make the design a bit more interesting.

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It is my intention to craft a recipe for the notorious but delicious Nick Tahou’s Garbage Plate that will not only be free of meat and dairy products, but will retain the greasy and gritty taste of the original.

This will require research — trial and error — based on an admittedly fading seven year old memory. I expect there have been attempts at this before, however the quality is likely comparable to the dozens of other misnamed knockoffs throughout Rochester.

For those unfamiliar, see the description here and here.

After more than a year and a half of procrastination, false starts, and restarts the redesigned www.tomhurlburt.com has launched. Under the surface the site is a custom wordpress theme with a few very specific plugins that attempt to give the appearance of a more dynamic infrastructure, without all the necessary programming. Consider the design a perpetual work in progress. Tom is a Camera TD at Blue Sky Studios.