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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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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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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Dear Flickr,

You know that I like your site as a place to display photos. Like so many other people, I happily upload my piles of crappy images to your servers in the hope that one or two lost souls might stumble across them and, becoming confused from the long journey, consider them worthy of viewing.

I realise you are not perfect and remain in that mythical state called "perpetual beta" as a way of warning users that there will be some rough edges. And, boy, are there some rough edges. However, your abuse of user interface conventions and sacrificing of simple web browser functionality to the Gods Of Web 2.0 are not the topic of conversation for today. Rest assured, we will be talking about those in the near future, but today we have a much more serious problem to address.

To wit, when the Exif data from my camera says the following (and I am quoting from your own interpretation):

how about we agree that it is incorrect — nay, dishonest even — to decide that the upload date is something like this?

Due to stupidity on my own part, I had need to replace a large number of photos in my Berkeley set today and after going through the somewhat tedious replacement process, I now have to spend more time going through and correcting dates. I have noticed your tendency to get the dates incorrect in the past, but the ongoing problem is really starting to annoy me.

Please try to do better in the coming year.

Thank you for your attention,
Malcolm

P.S. Yes, I've filed a bug report.

Topics: photography/flickr

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Syndication has become important over the last few years. Sure, it's been around for a while, but these days it's almost at a point where I could see my parents using it — OS installations are shipping with feed readers, third-party apps are readily available and the feeds themselves are pretty standard on many "updatable" sites.

That being said, having ubiquitous feeds throughout a site is not a universal trait. If creating a feed is any real amount of work, it means you have to actually design the feature and work out where you want feeds. If creating feeds is simple and somehow built into your toolkit (whether your toolkit is a bunch of common libraries, or a framework, or just the knowledge in your head) then you are going to be more inclined to put them everywhere you can.

I was recently thinking through how to integrate some feeds and some Atom publishing entry points in a site I am working on and I arrived at what I suspect is already common knowledge: each new piece of metadata is a potential feed. So if you classify things by author, then there could be a feed per author. If you (also) have tags, there is a potential feed per tag, and so on. Even in places where I thought this didn't quite make sense, it ended up being useful. A feed per day or per permalink? Sure — it includes the article, plus any comments and updates. Not everybody may want such a feed, but it costs nothing to include it (if you're clever) and for those who might like to consume your data that way, why not help them out?

Coincidental confirmation that this kind of mapping is useful arrived yesterday evening: Dave not unreasonably called me out for not taking many photos of where I live. This led me to wonder what other people had done around here (home) and looked up the area via Flickr tags. Well, sure, there are some useful tags such as pc2077 and hornsby. There is also a feed on each of these pages so that I can track any updates. Obvious enough, but not every website does this and Flickr has enough rough edges that I was briefly surprised they'd got to this point. Nice one, Flickr.

Topics: technology/xml/atom, photography/flickr, technology/metadata, thinking

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