nathan bentley's personal playground...

Today I finally signed up for a pro Flickr account. Why hadn’t I done this sooner? Well, up until now, I’ve managed to convince myself that, because I own my own servers, I should probably just use of of them. Of course, as a developer, it shouldn’t be too hard to write some kind of flickr like gallery system, and I’d be up and running in no time.

In reality of course, this just didn’t happen. After losing my ipod (which doubled up as portable storage for a number of my photo albums) over the weekend, and realising that I’d be pretty distraught if I lost my photos, I decided that it’d be a good time to invest in a flickr account.

Once I did this though, I suddenly realised that I’d need to get uploading. It’s taken my roughly 12 hours, but I’ve almost managed to scrape together around 10gb of photos dating back to ‘98 (no easy task considering that they were scattered over 8 harddisks, some of which hadn’t been used in a long time…).

The realisation that I should have a) named my images in a sensible fashion, and b) removed a lot of the badly composed, badly lit, duplicates and frankly just utter shit photos has finally dawned on me. Looks like I’ll be spending another weekend doing just that soon.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly end without plugging the new flickr account, so here it is in all its shiny web 2.0 glory.

Saturday was really great weather in London and rather than stay in glued to my desk, working on my blog, I decided to grab my camera and flatmate (petermarkellis.com) and go take some photos. It’s been a while since I’ve been over towards Shoreditch, so thought it would be a great place to start - for those of you that don’t often head over to east london, Shoreditch has long been renowned for its bohemian atmosphere, as well as its excellent examples of urban decay and gentrification. After the usual shots of the market stalls, we stumbled across some great street graffiti and street art - and couldn’t resist taking some cheeky snaps of the “Banksy” style wall art.

After a solid day of walking and shooting, we decide to call it a day and hook up with Petes girlfriend for an impromptu picnic in Hyde Park - which, by the time we got food and hiked our way across the other side of London, soon became a night-time feast. Still, it was a much better way to spend the day than sitting staring at my monitor!