Rollip does one thing, and it does it very well. Taking your original photographs, it will transform them to authentic aged images – even surrounding them in a polaroid style border, then making them available to you to print and put them on your website.

As you can see from the results above, the filter has aged the image – de-saturating the colours and adding a certain amount of yellow to wash away the bright sky blues. It did take a couple of minutes to upload the image – which was about 6mb, and to create the result, but if your intentions are only to produce images for the web, then you could upload smaller images to begin with.

It’s very easy to use, and there are a number of options to play around with – I’d definitely recommend giving it a try here; www.rollip.com

Red Bubble is a website that allows you to display your photography, illustations and artwork and if you want – sell them as prints, t-shirts, calendars and greeting cards. Because the website does not tie you into selling your work – because some people either sell it already on their own site, or just want a place to show off their images – Red Bubble is also a very warm and friendly social network where contributors rate and comment other people’s work giving constructive feedback and advise.

I’m quite tempted to add some of my own photography to the website, then if feedback is good – maybe sell some of my images.

You can view Red Bubble here; www.redbubble.com

i stumbled on this blog via twitter and the first post was a little task to do with flickr. you have to go the 6th page of your own photostream and then select the 6th photograph – it may not be your best (mine certainly isn’t) – you should then add the tag ‘flickr meme’ and add it to the following group flickr meme group, and if possible add it to your blog like i’ve just done.

a short while ago i was contacted by a nice chap called scott, and he asked me if he could use one of my photographs [this one] on a dvd case for a new film that was about to be released.

he didn’t give me any information, apart from the fact there was no budget to pay to use the photo – my thinking at the time was some money would of been nice, but having my photo on the case was pretty cool, so i didn’t grumble and i let them use the photograph in question.

that was 2 months ago, and last week scott contacted me again and this time he sent through the final design for the case. it’s not the best design that i’ve ever seen – but, my photo is on the back and as it turns out the film stars ice t and gary busey – people who i’ve actually heard of – so that’s pretty cool.

here’s the layout.

the funny thing is that the photograph was taken using a 1.3 mega pixel camera phone, not exactly state of the art photography equipment.

social networking isn’t new to me, i’ve had a myspace page for a couple of years and i’ve been hooked into facebook for the last few months – it’s a great way of keeping in touch with people – it’s almost how friends reunited should be.

but now i’ve started to share my photographs.

i first signed up to ephotozine which is where a lot of the photographers that i see at work use. it’s aimed at the more professional photographer, the resulting gallery of work is very impressive and i felt a little over shadowed by most of it as i’m just starting out, i don’t use a proper digital slr like the majority of users, i don’t even have a tripod – crumbs, i must be almost frowned upon over there! epz is a good site and i’ve had some nice feedback from some of my images, i just don’t think i’m up to that standard… yet!

so this week i ventured over to flickr.com, it’s not the first time i’ve been on the site – there’s usually a stream of links from digg.com to flickr images – so I know my way around. first job was to register… yahoo! what are you doing here? I must of been under a rock when that purchase was made, you have to have a yahoo account, complete with yahoo email (like i need another email address) to sign up. great!

through gritted teeth i signed up to yahoo and it redirected me to my new flickr page, an empty box for me to start filling up. the basic free flickr account gives you enough space (100mb a year) to have loads of photographs, it also (unlike epz) allows you to upload loads of images at a time.

flickr is a lot more casual, which suits my level just fine. i’ve added a handful of images, but now i’ve got to get people to look at them – 3 days in and zero views

right then, i’m off to try and promote my flickr page!

easter weekend has just passed and on sunday night sunny clacton set some fireworks off from the pier – i took a couple of photos, here’s the link to my flickr;

www.flickr.com/martinlucas

enjoy!

yeah – i’ve been busy, i’ve been away and it’s still probably no reason for not posting anything. so a brief catch up and promise of some new posts very soon.

we went to dublin last weekend for a couple of days, had a great trip – it was my first time to dublin and it’s a really great city and saturday night was a proper night out in the company of 2 fantastic djs, ali and steve @ the morgan – it was like someone playing out all your records and a few that you should own to a really cool crowd in a great venue.

it wasn’t just partying though, we did the shopping thing and paid a trip to the national gallery where i got to see a Rembrandt and a Picasso – it was full of renaissance and classical arts, some more modern stuff would of been nice!

i’ve added some photo’s on to my image gallery, we got some nice shots on the plane back as well as some nice light and textures images in the hotel – which was really well designed and is highly recommended for anyone visiting Dublin.

i’ve decided that i like to take photos. we were purchased a digital camera for christmas and ever since it has been out and about with me and i’ve already taken some quite pleasing photographs, i’m so pleased with the results i’m even going to show them off! i don’t think i’ll ever be prolific or indeed as talented as many photographers that i’ve seen and indeed worked with during my day job – but it’s definitely a new fun hobby that i’ve adopted.

you can view and download my collection of photos on my flickr and stock.xchng.