Photography is one of my long-running hobbies and one which has given me a lot of enjoyment over the years, although it is not the passion for me that it is for many people.
For me, one of the best websites to come out of the so-called "Web2.0 revolution" is Flickr, a photo-sharing website. I use this to display some of my own work and to get inspiration by browsing other people's portfolios. It is also very handy for hosting images for use on other websites. Most of the images here at M-Space and at my blog are hosted at Flickr, and if you click on the image it will take you to my Flickr photostream, where you can (usually) see a larger version of the picture and also view my other work. A benefit of the site is that it allows you to group your pictures into sets (and put the same picture in multiple sets if desired) and describe them using tags, which makes it a lot easier to organise large collections of images.
This is my most viewed picture on Flickr (at the time of writing):
Here is my most favo(u)rited one:
And this one is a potato:
Photography is not the only form of visual art I like to indulge in. I also
enjoy painting and drawing, although I do a lot less of them than photography.
I have taken photos or scans of some of my paintings and drawings and put them
up on Flickr. Here's a watercolour painting I did of a seashell a few years
ago:
These days, most of my artwork makes its way on to my computer at some stage
in its life, and I often do a bit more work on things once they are there.
Usually that's simply a matter of a little bit of cropping or colour adjustment,
but sometimes I do slightly wackier things. Here's an example:
My favourite general purpose image manipulation software, by far, is GIMP. On the rare occasions when I need to to vector graphics, my tool of choice is Inkscape, while for simple image viewing I tend to use gThumb when I'm running Linux (which is most of the time) or IrfanView on Windows.
