By Amaze Founder Tim Knight
Edited by Dora Evans
Contributions by Rose Atkinson & Ian Kent

Amaze has a keen interest in photography, as it can be the basis for any creative media, and is in fact, a creative media in its own right. There have been many times when we have manipulated photos to create something special, which led us to CS Photography, a website for Civil Servants interested in photography.

To explain a little about where CS Photography fits into the Civil Service is actually quite easy, it was created as an un-official home for Civil Servants interested in photography, with Graham Thompson, and Ian Kent as the owners.

One of the key things about CS Photography is that they have galleries where you can view pictures that members have uploaded, such as the following wonderful photos in the Landscape, Sky and Panoramic Gallery.

CS Photography was given permission to host the Your Space 2010 Competition, created by the Cabinet Office, the general idea is to design a piece of art that explains what it is like to be a Civil Servant, and the winner will receive an art workshop at the Royal Academy in London.
You can join the Your Space Competition by going to the website

One of the faces you may know that are active users on the site is Rose      Atkinson, Head of Knowledge Management at the Cabinet Office. She has been a keen photographer from childhood, and still a keen photographer based in London, and Kent.

Rose Atkinson's images are thought provoking, often witty and humorous, sometimes dark and enigmatic.

"Rose Atkinson's galleries should be compulsive viewing to anyone who thinks they might be a photographer. She shows a wit, humour and really creative composition. Her work is refreshing and life affirming. An inspiration, and a joy, a celebration of photography of the highest standard."

Amaze still stands in awe of this lady, as she has already achieved a dream of Amaze by showcasing art work of Civil Servants at the Civil Service Live 09

The pictures below are some more examples of her amazing talent.

Ian explains the process of setting up the website below:

The CSPhotography site is entirely outside of work, it's something myself and Graham Thompson setup a few months back because there wasn't really anything else similar across the civil service.

We've never had any kind of official approval, though the fact we were asked by the cabinet office to host their Your Space competition is a positive sign. Graham had suggested the idea a couple of times on the MIT DG and as I have my own servers I offered to host it, which turned into the slightly bigger job of developing it.

When we set it up the first thing we did was setup the forum as that was the core of what we were looking for - offered all the basic features like discussion, polls and photo uploads. We then added in the other bits like the blog and Talk customising them to work with phpBB. After all that was done I completely rebuilt the site from scratch to iron out some bugs and improve the overall design. The site has been running for about 6 months now I think, but in terms of development time it was a good two or three months of work to get to where we are now.

The biggest challenges were getting the whole thing to work with phpBB's authentication/session handling and making sure each bit of the site followed the correct 'brand' - it's amazing how much damage Wordpress can do to phpBB!!

Amaze found the users of CS Photography to be friendly, helpful, and talented, and we look forward to a productive future together.
You can find Ian Kent’s own website here Graham Thompsons here and Keith Reeder’s website here just to name a few from the members of CS Photography.

You can find Rose Atkinson’s personal website here
All images by Rose Atkinson are Copyright © Rose Atkinson.
All Rights Reserved. Copying, altering, displaying or redistribution of any of these images, in any format or using any medium, without written permission from the artist, is strictly prohibited.

Photography, Your Space, amaze, dods, rose atkinson

Last updated 550 days ago by Tim Knight