Eye On Manchester

Eye On Manchester

Personal blog by Aidan O’Rourke photographer writer from Manchester & beyond…

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Manchester New York exhibition by Jan Chlebik photographer

This evening I went to the Manchester New York exhibition by seminal Manchester photographer Jan Chlebik. It was at the Artland Gallery, in the basement of the Friends Meeting House.

Manchester New York photos by Jan Chlebik

The exhibition features a selection of Jan’s superbly atmospheric grainy black and white photographs of Manchester and New York. It’s only on until mid-December 2008, and is worth going just for the sumptous free catalogue with large postcards of the photographs. All works are limited edition framed prints for sale at various prices.

Jan was in the same class as me in the early 70s at Xaverian College grammar school. This evening I met him for the first time in 35 years. I also met, for the first time, Ian Simpson, architect of the Hilton Tower and Urbis.

More information at www.artlandgallery.co.uk.

December 11th, 2008 | Category: Eye On Manchester | Comments Off

New site design made live - and then changed

On Wednesday 3 December, after months of preparation, I made the long-awaited new design live

But within a few hours of making it live, on the basis of monitoring, I decided to start making changes.

Certain aspects of the new design didn’t seem to be working as expected. And I decided to rearrange the layout of the new links and accompanying icons, placing them at the top of the page rather than the side. I temporarily removed the Premium Galleries.

By today, I had completed the changes to make this ‘evolved’ design, which I made live. I carried out more testing and monitoring and found it was working OK.

The premium galleries will shortly be returning, accessed by contextualised links rather than a drop down menu.

Over the coming weeks, months and probably years, the site will evolve incrementally with small changes taking place here and there. I have learned that when you have a large website, it is often not a good idea to make a set of major changes all at the same time because if something has a negative effect, it’s difficult to find out what it is. A website is a kind of web application and should be developed in a similar way.

The aidan.co.uk site receives around 200,000 page views a month and appears in high positions in Google for a number of keywords. It was relaunched as a database site on 8 October 2003 and has been online continuously since 1997.

December 8th, 2008 | Tags: , , , | Category: Eye On Manchester | Comments Off

My photo of an anti-congestion charge poster used in Independent

In today’s Independent newspaper, my photograph of an anti-congestion charge poster, taken at the Trafford Centre last year, appeared as part of an article by Paul Vellely about Manchester’s congestion charge referendum.

Trafford Centre anti-congestion charge poster 2007 (small)

My photographs are used frequently in various media. The deputy picture editor at the Independent in London found the photograph after doing an internet search. She contacted me by phone yesterday, we agreed a price, and I e-mailed the photo by return.

I am interested in all aspect of transport in the Manchester area. I also regularly photograph billboard posters, as I find many of them interesting and worth documenting. This was one of the first anti-congestion charge posters to appear. I will be photographic a cross-section of the pro and anti-congestion posters, which can be seen by the side of roads across Greater Manchester in the run up to the referendum.

Go to the Independent website to read the article online - The article includes the pro-congestion charge poster which appeared in print, but not my photograph.

November 25th, 2008 | Tags: , , , | Category: Media, transport | Comments Off

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