Moin1 I'm Patrick, I'm just a random guy (he/him) in my mid-30s living in Hamburg, Germany with my wife and our newborn.
When I got into photography, I first started uploading my pictures to Flickr but eventually moved to Instagram like everyone else. It was a fun new place, starting with blurry photos of food and slowly moving to nicer photography2. But this changed a few years ago.
Nowadays I don't feel good posting to Instagram anymore. I haven't done a proper post in a while3 and deleted my profile(s) twice. While Instagram brought me more into photography, it also pushed me away from it. Ads, influencer marketing, and an algorithm obsessed with random people's reels took over, and my photography community was gone.
I don't want to stay trapped in social media platforms that feel like walled gardens anymore, always changing their rules and visibility algorithms (to display more ads).
My newly launched photoblog is my response to that. My pictures are visible if I want them to be. I don’t think I'm a very good photographer, but this photoblog doesn't have an algorithm. It doesn't have ads, it doesn't want to influence anyone. It's just about photos. And about me, of course.
My photos originally lived on another text based blog, but I decided to separate the photoblog from my other posts and move it to a dedicated domain, independent of the username i usually use4.
I'm really happy that I got the domain ptrcks.photos and how I'm able to use Bearblog for this, which is a text-centered community blogging platform. To make the site look the way I wanted, I have modified the great Bearming theme and its gallery. Also, there's an experimental ○ stories feature in my nav bar, next to the categories for black & white photography, Halide's process zero, and stickers.
Most photos are #shotoniphone, from a 4S my current 17 Pro. For this summer, I'm eyeing a Ricoh GRIIIx or a Fuji, though…
I have just launched this new website a few days ago. Feel free to leave a message in my guestbook and tell me how you got here. If something's broken, I'm probably already about to fix it, but you can also contact me about this :)
'Moin' is the typical and most popular greeting in Hamburg.↩
I'm still posting some Instagram Stories with a pic dump when I've been traveling, but that's probably only happening thrice a year.↩
I realised that posting under a different alias somehow frees the mind, makes you look beyond the horizon and experience novelty (sounds like AI, but I wrote that myself!).↩