grahambinns.com

I've been getting more and more serious about this photography lark for quite a while now, and one of the sites that I've been enjoying most is that of Belgian pro photographer Bert Stephani, particularly his video series Confessions of a Photographer.

Today, Bert and his friend Pieter Van Impe have announced their new project "by photographers, for photographers:" LIME, which stands for Learn, Inspire, Motivate and Experience. The site, www.squeezethelime.com, contains articles (well, just one at the moment), videos and links to photo sets on the LIME project's Flickr photostream. There's also details there about upcoming workshops that Pieter and Bert will be running in 2009. Whilst these seem a bit pricey (Bert's I've seen the light all day workshop has a special introductory price of €180 inc VAT, plus whatever the cost of travelling to the venue in Belgium) I'm sure they're worthwhile; I may even contemplate attending one of them myself.

Aspiring pro photographers (me included) might do well to take a look at LIME; I suspect it's going to produce some really cool stuff and I'm really looking forward to what comes out of it.

Matt Revell has started posting a series of interviews with the Launchpad Development Team. His interview of yours truly, Meet Graham Binns, is the first up:

Matthew: What can we go and look at that you've done on Launchpad?

Graham: The bugs pages :)!

Actually, a great deal of my work is work you don't get to see. Although I do some UI work (I'm working on something pretty cool at the moment that should hopefully appear in either Launchpad 2.1.11 or 2.1.12) the majority of what I do is back-end. In particular, I've been responsible for developing the way Launchpad interacts with other bug trackers like Bugzilla and Trac.

Once again, he hotlinks XKCD, but it's a message worth spreading (click to embiggen):

(And as Reynolds pointed out, The Open Rights Group fights against this sort of nonsense, so please, if you feel at all strongly about this, join them)

Link (click image for embiggenment):

It's funny, isn't it: I first set up this blog to be a place where I talked about my writing. These days it's more of a place where I talk about my photography. What a twisted web we weave.

Two people in the last week have asked me whether I have a photographic portfolio. The first was someone with whom I'm corresponding about a potential project (and to whom I haven't yet responded, oops), who asked whether they could see a portfolio of my work, and the second was the endlessly enthusiastic Kat Kinnie, who asked me whether I had one on Wednesday night as we were having dinner at Bacon's Birthday Bash.

And both times, I thought the person asking the question either a) thought I was something I wasn't or b) was nuts. I'll let you assign a and b to the different parties as you see appropriate.

It's never occurred to me that I should have a portfolio; not once. As far as I've been concerned, a portfolio is something that a professional photographer would have, and to my mind I can't be a professional because:

1. I don't get paid for my photography.
2. I don't think I'm good enough to get paid.

There was much in the way of repeated assertions that I am a good photographer on Wednesday night from both Kat and Jono, though it was Jono's "For such a talentless man, you're quite good at it," that finally won me over.

Anyway, whether or not you think I'm good enough, I now have a portfolio set on Flickr, here. Don't say you weren't warned.