Damien Mulley

This will be the final Guest Photographer for a while though there is still a long long list that I want to get through. Red Mum is another fantastic photographer and has become a good friend over the past few years. Check out her blog as also her photos. The photos below are really good. She’s also an Award winning blogger too. Multi-talented!

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When I agreed to do a guest post for Damien I didn’t think it would be so hard to pick my favourite images to write about until I began to try.

No matter how hard I thought I wasn’t able to narrow it down or even narrow down the criteria I was trying to use. Besides a lot of my personal favourites have been done to death by me on my blog so I thought I would leave it until after the weekend and think about it again with a fresh mind.

Good job too because I was up in Belfast for a Flickr meet where I met up with a gang of Belfast Flickrers and got plenty of inspiration. That’s the thing about social networking sites; there is an actual element of socialising and networking, oh yeah and a bit of craic as well.

While I have met other Flickrers before, this was the first big (well it was nine-strong) Flickr Meet I’ve attended and it wasn’t hard to spot us given we were all carrying large cameras.

Once the introductions were dispensed with and we allowed an appropriate amount of leeway waiting time for the late arrivals and off we went with a loose plan in place.

These meets are brilliant and a great way to explore your love of photography, get hints and tips from other photographers, learn from the images they take and have some fun all at the same time. The meets are also perfect for the kind of ‘off the cuff’ images I like to take.

When I got home and looked through the images I was delighted with my batch and am well impressed with everyone else’s contribution. While we were often taking the same scene I found the differences in the images sometimes startling.

There was also safety in numbers too. I don’t know about anyone else but I can find it hard sometimes to approach someone and ask if I can take their photograph, I have done it but I do find it sometimes urrggg to ask. With a group like a Flickr meet potential subjects are bemused and flattered and sometimes more inclined to be happy to have their image captured. Having the group around me made me braver about taking up-close portraits of strangers.

The images I choose from the day both have a lot of movement in them which is why I keep being drawn back to them. The first two show a gang of kids who were great fun practising their freerunning opposite St Anne’s Cathedral. They ran and jumped on queue, posed for the camera and were delighted that we were having such fun with them as our models.

My next favourite image/series is of two kids who were having fun with the cool fountain in Belfast’s Custom House Square.

The next image is of three boys who were standing on the wall watching the marching bands go by. We had strayed off the beaten track following the sound of the bands until we ended up on an estate off the Shankill. The almost military stance they adopted was a little disturbing.

After the Flickr meet we went out for a few pints and on our way we ended up in deep discussion with the taxi driver who was telling us about his recent forays into photography. He was thrilled to hear there is such a site as Flickr and was blown away by the notion of a Flickr meet, so I have a feeling we may see him at the next one. Maybe we’ll see you as well 🙂

And no Flickr meet is complete without a group shot, here’s some of the crew who turned up on the day.

Alan, Mymsie, Jett, Anna, StepBar and me. The others who attended and weren’t in this image were Nicky, Dogtired, digitalEnvironmentalist. You can check out the pool of images at this link.

I should finish up by thanking Damien for the guest post opportunity and for once again flagging Irish photobloggers, I’ve been enjoying everyone’s contributions and hopefully mine matches up in some small way to the excellent series.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under blogs, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.