A year in pictures.

I’ve now pretty much left Instagram, bar for commenting/liking, and have moved my day-to-day photos towards Flickr.

For a while, I’ve had a feeling of wanting to take longer-lasting photographs, of better quality, that actually stand-up to time  — something which Matt well articulates. This post-Instagram, post-filter landscape has been accelerated by Instagram’s recent behaviour that has undermined its value to me and sullied the gentle social: the main reason I loved their service.

It is still a good record of the bits and pieces that I’ve experienced over the past year — including getting married, a handful of trips to Mitteleuropa and more Copenhagen — but next year I’d like to get better at photography, with a better camera.

So, 2012, through Instagram:

January.

February.

March.

April.

May.

June.

July.

August.

September.

October.

November.

December.

Instagram and Other People’s Shopping Lists.

Since October last year, Instagram has ruled my photograph taking. It’s done what Flickr should have done and what twitpic, yfrog and the like thought they were doing — a simple, single-purpose photo sharing mobile app.

It gets a lot of flak from people moaning about the use of filters, but that misses the point of what it really is. Like criticising twitter for people’s spellings. As a social space, it’s probably my favourite at the moment. It reminds me of the early days of twitter – the days when you followed a fairly small, but diverse, group of people. When you shared ideas – occasionally what was for lunch – and didn’t have to worry about blocking all the SEO spammers or niche retail outlets from Kentucky, or people shouting for attention.

Back Red Pop.

I’m not a massive Kickstarter user, I don’t trawl it looking for interesting things to put money into; the only thing I’ve backed before was for one of my favourite bands to record with my favourite producer.

Sometimes, though, an idea is just so stupidly good it needs to be made. This is where Brendan Dawes (of magneticNorth) and his newly-founded physical objects imprint, Beep Industries come in. Despite being a web/interaction design agency, mN have made a couple of nice physical things over the years — the Mixa USB c90 and MoviePeg — so to move those things over into a new company is logical.

The thing that makes it perfect is their latest product prototype, Red Pop. Red Pop is a physical camera trigger for the iPhone. More than anything, it’s a BIG RED BUTTON for the iPhone. It is this kind of stripped down and fun thinking that Brendan brings to everything (even if he does indulge in being grumpy from time to time).

Watch:

http://vimeo.com/23965562

Now go and back it. With 40% pledged in just over a day, I am looking forward to this being available in all the best places.

Help: Helsing’s Fire.

Hello. I need your help. Recently, I have been playing the wonderfully Victorian, macabre and tricky iPhone game Helsing’s Fire (iTunes link).

It is an excellent take on the German board game Waldschattenspiel (lit. “forest shadow play”), which uses tealights and triangular trees to defeat dwarves. Tom Armitage elicited many coos about it at Interesting North. It looks bloody marvellous, but apparently isn’t that great fun to play.