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- Edit My Images
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If you had been on social media about half decade ago, there was some small chance you might have heard of a Brit named Giles Turnbull. This bloke went on to shoot black-and-white photographs, and posted them daily on the Internet throughout the month of June 2019: not on Instagram, not Flickr, not even on a web blog; he posted them... to a small XML file sitting conspicuously on one page of his website. A file people today have now largely forgotten its existence and purpose: an RSS feed.
He called his project "Black and White and RSS", which was met with some fanfare during its short run. However, like most of semi-viral things on the Internet, it was quickly forgotten afterward. As it was an advocacy project which promoted the uses of old-school platform-independent Small Internet "follow" tool (feed readers), I felt it was such a shame that I've seen no one else picked and applied this concept on their works; photography or otherwise...
Fast-forward to mid-2023 in Bangkok, Thailand; as local municipality have been gradually changing sodium streetlights to LEDs. Some photographers were rejoiced that colors are coming to the night; but not me. I have always seen high-pressure sodium lights as "artificial fire" with night-appropriate brightness and color temperature to match: comfortable the eyes, pleasant to stroll in, has its own aesthetics to photograph under; and these are disappearing quickly, in favor of ungodly-bright sky-polluting insomnia-laden facsimiles of late-morning sun I've never asked for.
I was under no illusion that I could convince the mayor's to change this plan; so what I opted to do, was starting to haul my half-broken Sony Alpha-65 DSLR around in the nights, fitted with the least-broken lens I have in my house, to photograph every scenes I could find lit under traditional sodium lights; for posterity.
But if I was just keeping these photos to myself, how could other people even realize that things photographed under sodium lights could be interesting or even looking good, then? Surely, I wasn't going to post to Facebook, Instagram, or Flickr, since I hate them; then that old "Black and White and RSS" photography project came to mind, a project which I have been desperately hoping that someone would pick on the concept and revive it for all those years... it would now be a chance for me to do it.
So I set up my esoteric photo processing workflow (1), typed up the project's part-homepage-part-manifesto, manually styled it, illustrated its logo and icon, typed up that XML file (Atom feed this time)... and started uploading them to my website under a project moniker "Basked in Sodium Glow":
https://xwindows.in.th/sodiumglow/
Now, nearly 3 year have passed, with 100 photographs posted; the project continues on. If you use feed reader and like sodium lights, you're welcome enjoy. If you have seen other people out there posting photographs exclusively on Atom/RSS feed, I would really, really like to hear about them. (2) If you're not using feed reader but would like to merely comment about my effort or approach... well, have at it, I guess.
(1) Which I have have already described somewhere else in this forum, to several people's horror.
(2) Apart from Mr. Turnbull's project; the only one came close that I've seen was "Moments", a Instagram-ic feed by Manuel Moreale, but this one is still not exclusive to feed readers (photos within were aggregated from regular browser-readable posts on the same site).
