Millionaire Milestone

January 26th, 2011

The other day – well, somewhere between January 22 and 23 GMT – the visitor counter for Someone Once Told me clicked past 1,000,000. I’ve taken a belated screenshot today (January 26) of part of the site stats and posted it here.

For quite a long time I’ve been staring at that particular figure, punching in the digits from September 8, 2007 when the site went fully live, to see what the running total of visits was. The big prize was to eventually get up to 1m, and now it’s been achieved I feel something of a sense of relief, and pride, and great pleasure that so many people have contributed to the SOTM idea, by either visiting the site or contributing an image.

The figure of 8.3m page views, one which rises regularly, is rather bloody marvellous too, and testimony to how much interest is generated by the things other people have been told around the world, some of which are on display on the site – more than 1,200 and rising daily.

I have been idly wondering of late how I might wind SOTM up one day, how best I can ever provide an exit from it, not because I don’t love it utterly and wholeheartedly, but because I’m always wracked with doubt about how many images I can possibly get, and how long can it all go on for before things just grind to a halt.

Well, stats like the one posted above make me believe that the SOTM adventure has a little while longer to go yet.

Thanks to everyone who’s ever visited the site – now for the next 1m hits.

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SOTM iPhone app

October 26th, 2010

Mockup for SOTM app homepageWork is firmly under way on the SOTM iPhone application, and here’s a screen shot of the home page – click on it for a larger image, which you can also zoom in on.

My idea is to allow people to use the app to take SOTM photos without the need for paper, pen or conventional camera, at any time or in any place. Instead, it can all be done via this app which will take a photo of someone, then allow the user to place a white space in front of their subject’s image, mimicking the SOTM style.

Then, a relevant message can be typed onto the white space, and the image will be sent to me, for use on the SOTM website. Also, the user can post their app images to their twitter and Facebook pages.

I’m currently talking to a charity about paying the profits from the download fees to them, and hopefully that will work out to become a fruitful partnership for lots of different reasons. I’ll post more on that as things progress there.

I certainly hope that people will use the app to generate photographs for SOTM, but also I hope the downloads will mean a few people from poorer backgrounds around the world will benefit from the SOTM project. Which would be pretty cool all round.

The app will hopefully go live around the start of December, and I’d love for people to blog about it and generally spread the word when it does. And download it, of course :-D It will only be available on the iPhone, as I can’t afford to go cross-platform, but so long as that works out as well as I hope, then I’ll be looking for sponsors to develop Blackberry and Android versions, with the same charity policy.

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Hacked Off

August 21st, 2010

You might have noticed how Someone Once Told Me and this blog were both blacklisted by Google, Firefox and AVG for about 10 days around the end of July/start of August.

This was because a hacker, or at least probably their software, exploited a WordPress security issue, gained access to SOTMario and placed dodgy code here. We’re not sure what sort of code it was, but it wasn’t up very long.

However, the hacking software then jumped over to the SOTM site and put the code on there too, because the passwords for both sites were the same. Those passwords have been changed now, of course, and are no longer matching.

Max, SOTM’s programmer, took the code out swiftly, but it took Google a few days to give the all-clear, so in the meantime the hits slumped. But normal service has now been resumed, so hopefully things will get back to normal now.

Apologies for the disruption, and thanks for your patience.

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Refugee Week

June 13th, 2010

Bakri Alnajeeb's SOTM

Bakri Alnajeeb, from Sudan, chose a SOTM in Arabic

I had a meeting a few weeks ago with those nice people from the British Refugee Council (Farida Stanikzai) and Refugee Week (Gerdy Rees). They told me about their plans for Refugee Week, in which a number of events are held to celebrate the things that refugees bring to this country, when they no longer can live in their own.

We chatted about what they were up to and SOTM and decided to combine our efforts. So Farida took six SOTMs of refugees currently in the UK, and gathered up some of their stories – you’ll see them start appearing on the site from 14 June.

The organisers of Refugee Week said: “The purpose of Refugee Week is to deliver positive educational messages that counter fear, ignorance and negative stereotypes of refugees, through arts, cultural and educational events that celebrate the contribution of refugees to the UK, and promote understanding about the reasons why people seek sanctuary.

“Refugee Week was first held in 1998, and was created in response to the increasingly negative perceptions of refugees and asylum seekers held by the general public in Britain. It remains the only UK-wide event that promotes the importance of sanctuary and the benefits it can bring to both refugees and host communities.

“Refugee Week is a multi-agency project, managed by the Refugee Week Team which consists of the UK Coordinator for Refugee Week, Welsh and Scottish Co-ordinators and a small number of volunteers with specific skills. Different regions, areas and towns have their own Refugee Week Steering and Operational Groups which manage and co-ordinate Refugee Week activities in their areas.”

So there you go – check out what someone once told refugees from Iraq, Pakistan and Sudan among other places.

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Farewell to Emilie

March 7th, 2010

Emilie Stammers' SOTM

After putting a shout out on twitter for volunteers, I was contacted by Emilie Stammers. So we met in Camden for a coffee – or at least I had a drink, as she refused my offer of one, stating that she had just drunk a coffee before my arrival and would “be up all night” if she had another.

We chatted for a while, during which she talked about starting university, her boyfriend, her parents and her dad in particular. Then we went around the corner to a snowy Camden Lock and I took her shot there, along with her video, before we parted.

About a month later I got an email one evening, which I read at the very moment that Ronaldinho scored against Manchester United in their Champions League game. I was shocked by what I read, so I turned away from the football and read the email again to try and make sense of it. It was from someone called Dave, who informed me that he was Emilie’s friend and that she had killed herself about three weeks after I’d taken her photo.

He said she was a big fan of SOTM and “very excited” about appearing on it. He also went on to urge me to use Emilie’s picture and has also set up a Facebook group in her memory.

Although I’d only met Emilie once, I was upset by all this. She was 18, bright, with clearly a lot to live for. But I didn’t want to use her picture if it upset her family, who already had that tragedy to deal with. So I emailed Robin, Emilie’s dad, who looked over the material and gave me his blessing. His testimony about his daughter forms a large part of the blurb beneath her photograph.

So, if you read this blog post, please do visit Emilie’s picture. I think she would have liked that.

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Posted in Encounters | 1 Comment »

Guardian Press Photography

November 5th, 2009

Guardian Press PhotoI was tipped off by @hayjane about an excellent new series on press photography being run by the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK.

Starting on Saturday 7 November, the series is made up of a nine-part free booklet giveaway called 100 Years of Press Photography (you still have to buy the paper, obviously). Each booklet will be grouped by decade, starting with the 1910s and 1920s. The booklets promise to be a fantastic collection of images from the last century, and here’s the official blurb:

In order to find the greatest press photographs from the last 100 years for this exclusive new nine-day series, the Guardian asked a wide range of international photography experts to nominate their favourite images. The panel includes photographers Nan Goldin, Martin Parr and Wolfgang Tillmans, veteran journalists Ian Jack, Peter Beaumont and Katherine Whitehorn, and other photo enthusiasts like filmmaker Anton Corbijn, novelist Siri Hustvedt, writer Geoff Dyer, publisher Jefferson Hack and musician Antony Hegarty.

The scope of the series ranges from hard news photographs from the front line of international conflicts to social documentary of everyday events, fashion photography and portraiture. Each instalment in the series offers a unique and surprising glance at the decade through the eyes of some of the world’s greatest photographers.

The series also reveals some of the secret stories behind the world’s most iconic images. Read an interview with one of the last surviving witnesses of the 1937 Hindeburg disaster, photojournalist Ron Haviv on his harrowing ordeal photographing the Balkan war, BBC reporter Kate Adie’s eyewitness account on the Tiananmen Square ‘tank man’, and the story behind the most controversial picture of 9/11.

Sounds pretty good to me, so I’ll be checking it out. Drop me a comment on what you think about it.

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Awesome Parents

October 31st, 2009

My Parents Were AwesomeThis is cute – a site called My Parents Were Awesome , where people post pictures of their parents when they were young.

The site says that “before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome”.

Well worth checking out, and it’s easy to submit your own parents’ image – so long as they were once awesome, of course. Thanks to @MichaelRpdx on twitter for pointing it out.

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iPhone Images

October 29th, 2009

CrowdBoing Boing has featured the Japanese ‘iPhonegrapher’ Koichi Mitsui who walks around Tokyo taking pictures with his iPhone 3GS. “The iPhone has a single-focus lens with no zoom, and this simplicity keeps me devoted to only composition and the perfect photo opp,” he explains.

Some of the results are mixed, but generally there’s some lovely work here. Mitsui’s work shows that with a bit of effort some good results can still be had with the iPhone, which aside from its focus limitations is also a lower resolution than many other mobile phone cameras.

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Posted in Great Shot! | 1 Comment »

Palestinian Boxer

October 23rd, 2009

This link will show you a quite amazing image of 70-year-old Mohammed Shuhadeh, who runs a gym in the West Bank town of Jenin. He was a boxing champion in the 1980s, and claims to have been the first person to open a gym in the Palestinian territories 40 years ago.

That shot is just one of a series taken by the AP photography agency, more of which can be seen here, albeit on a smaller scale. Click the right arrow to scroll through the images, which are beautiful not only for how they look, but for the story they clearly tell. Every time I look at any of the shots of Shuhadeh’s gym, I see a new detail.

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Twitter Treats

October 21st, 2009

Shoreditch SunsetThis is the first of a particular series. Whenever I see an interesting tweet on twitter about a photograph or something to do with photography in general, I’ll reproduce it here. This beautiful picture of a sunset in Shoreditch, London, is courtesy of @grumblemouse

FalmouthAlso, this lovely shot of Falmouth was tweeted by @LloydDavis I like not least because I’ve fond memories of Falmouth – I went there to cover the return of Ellen MacArthur when she broke the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2005, and was only a few feet away when she jumped up and down on her boat, brandishing two flares, which are the famous pictures of her from that time.

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