WME Flickr Focus - January 2019

January is never the nicest of months, usually being too cold and dark to generate much enthusiasm for anything, but the good news is that February is just around the corner. Nonetheless, the first few weeks of 2019 have made some telling contributions where the West Midlands Exploration photostream has been concerned...

Tipping the scales with no sign of a New Year's diet is Exploration Extra, eagerly gorging on photos from 2018's Rail Rover and Fishguard holiday adventures. Rail Rover ruminates upon Cheltenham courtesy of some railway station and bus depot signage (plus a peek at the Old Restoration pub), whereas Fishguard fine-tunes a mileage marker and a boat called Sanity. Aberystwyth adds in an arty Winsor & Newton advert while Banbury breezes in with the Dog & Gun, not forgetting a further Forage find to keep things accumulating nicely.

The remainder of January's photostream activity has otherwise been concerned with tidying up some random archive extractions. Among the arrivals are the Farcroft at Handsworth and a Queen Elizabeth Hospital bus stand (WME Birmingham), the Cat & Fiddle at Pheasey (WME Walsall), a reminder of the latterly demolished Balds Lane Tavern near Lye (WME Dudley) and a Black Country Ales pub sign for the Midland in Bearwood (WME Sandwell). Honourable mentions meanwhile go to Blists Hill's drapers shop (WME Telford), a Lyndhurst Road ceramic street sign (WME Wolverhampton) and a display character sporting historic eyewear at Warwick Castle (WME Warwickshire).

On the surface this all appears to be photostream business as normal then, however I am beginning to wonder whether the time has come to freshen things up a bit. I first joined Flickr in 2011 as a direct replacement for my previous Fotopic-based website, so I just stuck with the same background process of resizing, editing and then publishing my photos. My preferred image size has remained resolutely 600 x 450 or thereabouts which was fine for my first forays into digital photography but the technology has moved on considerably since then. I'm not sure this approach works any more for showcasing my pictures at their finest yet I don't just want to undo several years of effort building up my Flickr archives. I'm therefore weighing up how best to proceed - carry on as usual, try larger resolutions, or maybe even see what other photo-hosting options might entice me (Instagram perhaps). I expect the WME Flickr photostream will be rumbling along for a good while yet but please bear with me if I start experimenting a bit more...