I get a lot of joy from using Flickr, both as a contributor and browser. One of my favourite streams of photos to watch comes from Flickr username Seb Przd (he a blog, too). I've never met this gentleman, but his photos are amazing. As his profile mentions, he specialises "in all kinds of images that cannot be taken with physical cameras."

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Topics: art, photography/flickr, software/open source

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Having bought myself a DSLR camera that was well beyond my abilities and intellect (a Nikon D70) a few years ago, I've been spending a fair amount of time trying to get better at this whole photography thing. Taken many photos, most of which are unpublishable. Still haven't conquered my fear of taking photos of actual people, but that's for the future.

Recently, though, things have started to come together. I read a number of good reviews of Bryan Peterson's book Understanding Exposure and was given it as a present recently. I've now read it carefully a few times and am slowly managing to put his ideas into practice and, most importantly, using my camera in something other than P mode. Also, following on from some articles (and their associated excellent comments) at Tim Bray's blog (such as this recent one), I bought myself a fixed length lens (a Nikor 50mm f/1.8 lens for my birthday and have been trying to do more with less flexibility in the field of view.

After the cut, a few thoughts on some recent experiments. Mostly as notes for myself in the future...

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Topics: photography

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Last week, I mentioned that I had played in a simultaneous chess exhibition against Boris Spassky. I went and hunted out some photos from that event today. Looking at the photos around it in my photo album, it looks this must have taken place sometime around June, 1989, not 1990 as I first guessed.

There's 18-year-old me resigning to the World Champion of 1969–1972. I wasn't ever a really good chess player, so the result wasn't too surprising. There are a couple of other photos (this one and here) from the same night in my Flickr account.

[This scan is unfortunately very grainy, partly because the original is looking a bit worn at the moment, but mostly because it really suffers from the conversion to 8-bit color that the Gimp enforces. 16-bit color support in the Gimp cannot arrive fast enough for me. Yes, I know about Cine Paint, but it's a long way behind the Gimp in other features, so I don't have it built and installed. A few more crappy scans like this and I might have to change my mind, though.]

Topics: chess, photography

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Many words have been written about what makes a good photo and how to compose and frame a shot. For the rank amateurs, such as myself, though, there's a huge difference between knowing these guidelines intellectually and being able to put them into practice. Even when sorting through photos and trying to decide which ones to publish, it's sometimes hard to work out if a photo is going to be interesting for other people to look at or not.

Recently, more or less by accident, it occurred to me that Flickr's badge of photos that are in many sidebars (including on this blog), provides a quick check as to whether the composition in a photo is working easily or not. The smaller size concentrates the eye on the overall features of the photo and not the detail. This is neither a new discovery nor a hard and fast rule (see below for some obvious exceptions), but I thought it was interesting and this is my writing space. Following are some examples of what I've noticed in my own photos.

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Topics: art, photography/flickr

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Suppose you were a startup company trying to attract people to work for you. You wanted to sell yourself as a "cool place to work". One approach, taken by Exoweb is to have a Flickr group devoted to their company. Probably kind of obvious in retrospect, but I'm easily impressed.

I found this whilst mindlessly browsing through Flickr today and realising I hadn't checked out the Django/Python cluster in a while. Always interesting to see what people are doing there.

(I'm not associated with Exoweb in any fashion; I've never paid any particular attention to them until 20 minutes ago. Merely noting their cluefulness in this particular instance.)

Topics: software/django, photography/flickr

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After having a reasonably productive morning, I decided to do some random sysadmin tasks for my home setup that have been sitting on the list for ages.

What follows is some rambling from spending a couple of hours happily wrapped up in "new software" land. Mostly (only?) of interest to Linux users.

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Topics: software/graphics, photography, technology/sysadmin

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(I should be finishing off a prototype for a client meeting tomorrow. So naturally, I'm browsing the web and thinking about other stuff instead.)

Dave Shea has rolled out a redesign for his Mezzoblue website. Naturally, being a blog, there is a post about the changes and choices. I am not a designer, but I like reading about how other people work and I know what I like to look at, so Dave's thoughts make interesting reading (he was the guy who started CSS Zen Garden for those recently returned from a three year stay on Mars).

One of the interesting ideas on the site is hist idea of grouping posts into collections for archival purposes. Go read the above post for details and links, but there is some interesting thinking going on at the moment about how to present archives outside of just a list of dates. I particularly liked his idea of tying the colour scheme for each page in a collection to the photo at the top.

Dave attributes this idea to (amongst others), the Absenter photo journal. Go and have a look at this site. Click "back" a few times and notice how well the navigation colours match the image. Beautiful. I deeply wish I had the skills to create something like that, instead of just being able to be amazed by the result. Not all of the photographs appeal to me, but the ability to take a shot with mostly a single standout colour time and again is pretty impressive, too.

Topics: art/design, photography, technology/web

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(With apologies to Bill and Ted.)

Whilst I was in the US the last couple of weeks, I took a few days to just have a break and do something I'd been wanting to do for a while. I caught the Southwest Chief Amtrak train from Los Angeles to Chicago. This worked out quite well, since I had some business in Albuquerque to do anyway, so I stopped off there for a couple of days and then reboarded the train for the remainder of the trip. This works out slightly more expensively than just going straight through, but it was the journey, not the destination that was the whole point of the trip.

What can I say? Loved the trip. Both the coach chairs (Los Angeles to Albuquerque) and the slightly more upscale sleeper roomette that I purchased for the second leg were comfortable and it was easy to sleep through the night. The scenery was great. The meals in the dining car were very nice (the menu was extensive, too) and there were plenty of chances to just sit back and watch the scenery go by and meet new people. It was very relaxing and just what I was after. Didn't find too many other people just taking the trip for fun, although there were a few retirees that I had dinner with one night who admitted that they otherwise would have just driven from Arizona to wherever they were going. Quite a few people were taking because they didn't like to fly and were quite happy to admit that.

Albuquerque was interesting to visit, since I've never been in that part of the world before (below 30,000 feet). Had the chance to finally meet John Fleck in person. John and I met online through the GNOME Documentation Project about five or six years ago and have kept up a regular correspondence since. It was great to meet him (and his wife) and sit down for a chat over dinner.

With what might have been the first big cold snap of the winter coming through the mid-west and north-east of the US, the train was delayed quite a bit getting into Chicago and my day looking around parts of that city was somewhat hampered by the fact that after a few minutes oustide I could no longer feel my face. I was equipped for the cold weather, but that doesn't mean I was prepared for it. It was about 35 degrees Celsius (95 deg F) the day I left Australia and even a week in foreign lands wasn't time to completely adjust to the -7 C (20 F) that it was on the Saturday. Dinner with Adrian Holovaty finished off a nice four day vacation.

Then it was off to visit a client I've been doing some work for and back to the warmer climates of Australia. Still recovering a bit from the plane trip, but feeling almost human by now.

It was a bit of a challenge to take photos on the train, since you had only a few seconds to prepare for most shots and we were moving along at a decent clip for some portions. Still, a few photos came out reasonably and a set of the better ones is now on Flickr. Enjoy!

Topics: photography, travel

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Quoting from a Reuters piece, the Ig Nobel prize for mathematics was awarded to a couple of Australians: "Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of shots a photographer must take to almost ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed."

The point of these prizes is to make you laugh and then make you think. They nailed it on this one.

Some details of their work is available from an interview with the always excellent ABC Science Show earlier this year the same writeup, but with a graph and a little more symbology is here.)

(Original seen in the Nikon Flickr group.)

Topics: mathematics, photography

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Just got back from the post-office to pick up a parcel I had forgotten about. After a Flickr blog entry a couple of weeks ago about a new printing service, I immediately gave in and bought some of those pretty looking cards. Today they arrived.

The price wasn't too bad and I wanted something that wasn't really a business card, but had my somewhat tricky to spell name and email address for conferences, etc. So I bought a box of 100. The results are not too shabby. Well done, MOO.

For anybody else thinking of ordering these, a couple of things worth mentioning:

• They really are mini cards. About half the height of a business card and almost as wide.
• The stock is very solid, so they won't crumple. I suspect they will bend easily and won't unbend without a crease, though.
• Printing like this always washes out colour a little bit, so choose bright, contrasting photos. I didn't think about this as much as I should have, so a lot of my grey and dark green outdoor shots don't look fantastic from a distance. Not ruined, or anything, but it brings home that I need to take more colourful daylight shots.
• The aspect ratio of the cards means it is a challenge to fit an interesting subject in sometimes. In the feedback after purchase, I asked for an option to shrink photos slightly to fit (you can increase the magnication, but not shrink it).
• The printing on the back is very clear and neat. I liked that I had a choice of colors and fonts, although it was a fairly easy choice to make in my case.
• I can't take photos to save my life. Have a look at the MOO Flickr pool to see what real photographers are doing with these.

All in all, worth it and nice to have these around. Possibly too small to be truly useful as cards, but I can throw them around with abandon at my friends without feeling like I'm tearing up money.

Topics: photography/flickr

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