I’ve taken the Flickr galleries down. After two years, hundreds of business cards and a handful of replies I’ve come to the conclusion that open source/creative commons, at least as it might apply to photographers does not work. If you are a friend or a client and you already have a Flickr log-in, the galleries will function as before. If not, please contact me directly to gain access.

In the last three years I’ve uploaded more than 47,000 images (47,075 as of this morning). Some 39,000 people have viewed at least one of those images at some point. As I mentioned above, it’s unusual that I don’t hand out a card or two (or more) at every event I shoot at and ask the people to email me. The net result from all those cards, three emails in the last two years. And so ends the publicly available galleries.

I had genuine and probably naively hoped that the paradigm other than that of the photographer hiding away their work and locking it up except to paying customers would work. I had hoped and earnestly believed that if more people had access to the work it would at least generate some personal interest. I was wrong. And if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expected different results then at least that adjective cannot be applied to me…any longer.

Thanks for visiting and once again, if you a friend or a client and you cannot access the galleries, please drop me a line. I’ll make sure you can see the images as before.

Looking forward, the Flickr galleries will go away, to everyone, on January 29th. I’m still looking for a suitable successor. At this point it looks like Smugmug. At one time Flickr was a wonderful tool to make things simpler to see online. Now it takes extra time to manage, I’m constantly blocking off people who are cruising for bizarre porn or just anonymous people with no work of their own. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this change may cause and I only do it in hopes I can continue to do what I do best, which is take pictures.

Thank you.

-russell