Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh man oh man oh man...

Okay, so I don't want to jinx things and bore people rigid yet further with more photography... but I'm gonna do so anyway.

The last two weeks have been really crazy. First I had my first exhibition and sold a print, just the one, but it was a real nice feeling. Then, all of a crazy sudden, my hits on Flickr started dramatically escalating. In the last week days I've had over 75,000 hits. I've just broke 200,000 now. That's right. In one week I've made nearly half of what I've previously achieved in the last four or so years. I don't know if that's fantastic or weirdly insulting in a discombobulating way.

But that's not the all of it. I'm currently in the middle of an interview with an American photography subscription e-zine dedicated to street and social documentary photography. And it's a good one. The editor saw a photo on Flickr, followed to my website and was impressed. I'll be in an upcoming issue with a lengthy interview and photos.

And now I've been told by a local photography collective (oddly not Third Floor Gallery) that are setting up a big Cardiff photo project that they're interested in me doing some social documentary photography on folklore and customs and that they want me on their team. Not only that but Arcade Cardiff want me to have an exhibition in one of Cardiff's shopping malls. They're also going to give me advice on how to apply for an art grant to go to America and capture more US Civil War stuff, though they level with me that victory in that one will be odds against. Still, they say I've got something. They also saw my website and my recent little exhibition in the arts cafe.

There's a lot of ifs and maybes involved in all this coming up. I doubt a fraction of promises will materialise. All I know is its giving me the fuel and the inspiration to make this a real year of creation. I'm really going to try and fucking make something of this, this year - website wise, exhibition wise, book wise, exposure wise. Or die trying.

Thanks for following me, y'all. Sorry for being a bit one-track of late. But the photography bug has, well, bitten pretty hard. I'll probably be asking web-and-business-savy collective peeps here for advice!

Love and rockets,

Pete

P.S: Knocking on wood.

This is how success comes, in the Internet age more than ever -- you plug away making stuff, apparently in obscurity, then by chance someone sees something and it all snowballs from there. Good luck Pete!

All sounds brilliant Pete.

It's about time. If you can somehow squeeze your writing into it as well, you'll take the world by storm.

You deserve any success you get because you're really fucking good.

Best of luck! If I can be of any help with the web stuff, just shout.

Awesomes!

Pete, I know Good and you're it. Congratulations and best of luck.

Happy to dig up accounts of Welshmen in the war if that would help the application. Of course, you'd need some kind of fixer over there...

YEAH! Excellent!

This is awesome stuff! Well chuffed for you.

Sweet! Thanks everyone. Next step will probably be an e-commerce bit on the website for print purchases, etc. A friend says he'll help me with that, but I may come knocking here for advice too. He says he knows about those mysterious things called 'Analytics'.

With the blog I'll be pushing that hard, but still for now heavily weighted to pure photography, tips etc. I'm not in a place to do photography industry news because I get all my info on it from other blogs! But if I can become one of Fuji X's official photographers, man that would be sweet...



Ooh, that'd be handy. We've a couple of books in the library but anything like that would be of help. Plus yes, mysterious fixer!

Well done Pete. Photography baffles me, but I can appreciate good stuff.

Don't forget about us when you become internet famous.

[cough]Ashens.

To be fair, he flounced. Nothing to do with being internet famous.

Woot woot woot, as I believe the kids are saying nowadays!

Though seriously it is. I've long enjoyed your work, Pete, both written and photographic. Hard work and raw talent deserve every success.

Pete's stuff is great. I tweeted his photo of Doctor Who and the assistant a few days ago and it went down well. But as I don't think he's on Sinister Twitter I couldn't credit him properly. Bah.

Very well done, Pete - thoroughly deserved recognition!

FWIW I have several of your photos as my work PC wallpaper...

Excellent Pete!

go get 'em

Malc

Mrs Doc has seen these pictures go past (unattributed) on Tumblr, multiple times. I just pointed out who they were by and now she's going to correct people

Nice one Pete!

It might be time to think about watermarking them.

That'd ruin his computer, surely?

I did at least link to the front of the album and said it was Nervous Pete from here.

LINK TO THE FAMOUS PHOTO, PLZ!?

Woah!

Internets, I am impressed. So I logged onto Flickr and found a really nice message by Mrs Gaywood basically, "Real nice photo and yowsers! Have you seen Tumblr?!" Get back from pub and idly type in 'tumblr capaldi doctor' as search and uh, yeah. '7,511 notes' or something.

I guess I just assumed that with so many hundreds of people in close proximity to Peter Capaldi that there would have been other good shots of him, instead of everything else including the news outlets looking a bit crap, and thus my photo wouldn't get much attention. I'm baffled.

But I think this is probably a lesson that I should watermark such things in future for hits. Though frankly I don't care about other people glibly using it, there'll be hundreds of thousands of photos of Capaldi Doc before it's all through. Though I shudder at the thought of heels passing it off as their own, obv.

I probably should get on Twitter and Tumblr proper. Expect a thread where I expect you all to laboriously and patiently explain how I can MAXIMISE my website hits in doing this. Possibly this one.

Silly me. Ach.

Nooooo! Google fails me!

I am now on Twitter. Will this help my life? What do I do now? Ack!

1 - Go on Twitter
2 - Tell us your username
3 - ???
4 - PROFIT!!!

Congrats.

Really liked your flicker. If i had seen it earlier i would have hired you for my wedding

Ta Ruysan, why not check out my website too? *Cheesy grin*

My Twitter name is, imaginatively, petetakespics.

There! I tweeted!

Did I do it right? Er, I haven't the foggiest.

Fantastic mate. So pleased things are taking off for you.