I myself have been using Twitpic to post the occasional interesting photo from my iPhone, but only when I’m on the move and I usually post these same photos to Flickr at a later date. Recently I’ve had much more free time to take photos with my “real” camera, and many of these photos are now on Flickr. Sometimes I’ll post a favourite photo to my blog and then link to the rest (rather than posting all of them as a long blog post). The reason I do this is the ability to tag, edit, archive and view stats – but there is so much more to it than that.

Flickr allows me to have a space online independent from my blog, my twitter, and my social networking. I have control on how they are displayed and archived (and can be as meticulous about this as I need), I can tell stories that go with the images, I can make notes to focus your attention to something special hidden within, and when I’m feeling nostalgic I can go back and review my own photostream based on tags I’ve created (see my tagcloud here). I can upload the well taken photos, and the badly taken ones too – if they say something that should be retold, they belong on my photostream.

However, what I really want to do with Flickr is share my photos, and see yours too. Today for instance I checked up on David’s travels in Beijing, Rory’s travels in Japan, I also met John’s gorgeous family, laughed at the bizarre mannequin Steph spotted, day-dreamed about Killiney Bay and wondered about the mind of an artist. Flickr can be a wonderful sneak peek into the lives of people you know and even strangers you might one day meet.

At the moment I only have 56 contacts (compare this to the almost 300 people I follow on twitter). I want more.  I want to follow your interesting lives, I want to comment on the things you’ve done and places you’ve seen. Almost every day I login to Flickr and check my contact’s uploads, the same way I login to Google Reader to check my RSS feeds – the difference is, photos can tell a totally different story, and can share the stories we don’t have the time to tell. Many of us lead busy lives, leaving us with not enough time or patience to blog as regularly as we would like, photoblogging is a taken a bit too seriously, but Flickr is a great way of sharing your life online without too much of a time or energy strain.

Plenty of bloggers that I read regularly will occasionally post their photos, but I always wonder about the photos that weren’t “good enough” for a blog post. Also, some bloggers are far better photographers than they realise and it’s a travesty that their incredible photos can disappear, lost in their blog post archives.

If you’re reading this and use Flickr add me. If you’re reading this and you post photos somewhere else, open a Flickr account and let us follow your life, taking a peek with each new upload.

So far, I’ve yet to master the finer “complicated” functions of the camera, which is frustrating but also makes me realise that for once in my life I should probably read the manual. The camera takes fantastic photos and it’s really quick, making multiple shots very easy to take. The 10x zoom is incredible, it makes you feel like a spy. It’s a lot of fun. Getting clear close-up shots of small objects isn’t easy though, having tried to take shots of a bearded dragon at the weekend I’ve come to the conclusion that I must (yes, must!) purchase a fisheye lens and macro, for panoramic and close-up shots. I don’t have any other negative comments, I’m very happy with my purchase, I did have one small problem with it though.

After less than a week of it being in my possession there was one very annoying problem – the additional memory card I purchased with it was faulty. I lost all of the photos I took at the weekend. However, I was pleasantly surprised to come up against no hassle whatsoever in Pixels, where I purchased the camera. When I explained the situation, they simply gave me a new memory card, none of the usual arguments or “I’ll have to talk to the manager” bull that I’m used to from sales people.

So, to make sure it was working perfectly with the replacement card, I took some shots of my dog Ben, who is definitely no stranger to the camera, in fact he is quite the little poser as you can see below.

The traditional digital camera market is completely saturated, and I’ve found it rather difficult to choose one (hence why I still don’t own one!) as my own terrible greed for “features” makes it impossible to stay within a reasonable budget. However, upon investigation I found an alternative to a DSLR camera that’s within budget. The Fuji FinePix S5600 Zoom: it’s only 5.1 megapixel, however it boasts 10x opitcal zoom. That’s impressive for €300, and it looks quite cool too. It has some wonderful features, for instance, movie recording in .avi format and the ability to change the lenses (I already have my eye on a fisheye! – ha ha).

The only drawback to buying a Fuji digital camera is the fact that they only take xD-Picture Cards, which is annoying considering I have plenty of MMC cards just lying around from old digital cameras and phones. If I’m to buy this camera I’ll have to purchase at least 1gb, which will set me back another €60, double the price of a standard MMC card. For now I’m not going to make any decisions, until I actually have the money. What fun it is to procrastinate.