DigitalAgency

An old, but still favourite, portrait of @ carolcoulter :

Social Media Week @MotherLondon.

I just dug this out from 2010 when I was lucky enough to be invited by @MotherLondon to host a series of daily events during Social Media Week, cumulating in an awesome social media quiz of the year, compared by James Brown of @SabotageTimes. I set the questions, took the shots, didn't get the t-shirt.

Indoors, er, at an outdoors company:

Another in the 'Reception-ist' series.

Waiting to be 'called upstairs' at my client Brasher. Down in the depths of Roy Keane country.

Reception-ist:

I spend a fair amount of time waiting for meetings and presentations in the receptions of agencies, clients, collaborators etc.

So now and again I'm going to post some shots on the blog of me, er, waiting.

My Mum always asks what the places I work at are like anyways, so here you go Mum.

caption: mightysmall. Edinburgh. February 26th 2008.

Tour de Kent:

I'm in Kent this weekend watching the Tour de France whizz by my pals front gate.

My blogging desk:

This morning, Iain asked in a post, about the desks we blog at.

This is mine.

Wanted to get it posted early as I'm out most of the day, but will post fuller report later.

The shot below is demonstrates the power of cropping, my desk area is in a mass of wires, papers, files and boxes etc, but the good old crop tool comes to the rescue.

Flickrisation:

A nice walk-through by CornDog of some of the different ways Flickr can be used.

I addition to the obvious user generated content aspects, I imagine brands too will directly leverage the power of Flickr in new and interesting ways.

Once they engage with it, noodle around, build some of their own widgets, and see where it can take them.

Football photography:

Hans Van Der Meer, (sounds like he's French eh?), has a wonderful online portfolio of photography which is well worth a look at if you like football.

(Or indeed if you don't like footie, but do like footography, (as we say in Yorkshire.)

Shot a lower league grounds around Europe, he's captured that 'doing it for the love of the game, rather than the money' attitude of true grass routes players and fans.

A nice and simple web interface just delivers up the shots with no fuss, no tricks, and let's the shots do the talking.

Very nice.

via: Coudal.

Classy plane photography:

Photographer Jeffrey Milstein via: Coudal.

Audio in Flickr anyone?

I've always been a huge fan of the Magnum In Motion site.

They have some great mini-documentaries, in really nice, elegant, Flash wrappers.

The 'Essays' section gives us the opportunity to hear the photographers who took the shots, give the background to them, which makes for a richer experience.

I particularly like this piece shot on a London Estate by Simon Wheatley. And there's some terrific Steve McCurry work.

The Observer is doing similar which is great too, and they've cleverly added something that I don't think Magnum have, which is a roll-over drop-down on each shot with additional textural info. Very neat.

(You can also subscribe to the essays on iTunes but the picture quality is poor compared to the main site.)

(Oh, and on iTunes, it's sponsored by Nokia with fairly modest 15 second ad on the opening titles. Which is okay in my book.)

And of course, why stop at photo collectives and newspapers?

This rich slideshow technique would work just as well for advertisers.

Not just for front-end sponsorship like Nokia, but with brands embedded in the fabric of story.

For example a reportage photographer might cover how people use cash machines for bank for, with audio interviews/observations/piss-takes, whatever. A photographer/soundrecordist might tag along on a book tour with a famous author, or a stag weekend sponsored by a beer company, or one of those 'Day in the life of a brand' pieces; you get the idea.

I also think that good stills slideshows online, with great sound, often have the edge over crappily encoded full motion video. You kind of 'get more out' of static images that 'token' video.

And of course, 'civilians' could use it too:

Imagine a Flickr extension, whereby you could add a sound track to the existing slideshow function, integrating with Odeo or something, or from your mobile phone from the gig, the holiday, the presentation/conference whatever.
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