5 posts tagged “flickr”
I went on my second Flickr photostroll yesterday. Croctommy and my new pal Katenadine from Flickr/PCNW came along. There were tons of people! The weather was perfect, I had a great time, and I am very much enjoying looking at everyone's shots.
I brought the Mamiya medium format TLR out for the first time since acquiring it last month. Some folks good some good shots of me with all the equipment. That stuff was heavy!
I was interviewed for an article about geotagging photos for the New York Times that was published today (Page C9 in the paper edition). The author saw a post I had made to the Flickr Geotagging group and decided to ask me for an interview. The photos were taken Tuesday in St. Edward State Park in Kenmore. I'm pretty happy with it, because the author actually knows what he's talking about and he didn't take my quotes out of context. We actually talked for a long time and he's pretty cool.
Here are some other blogs that mention the article:
I went to my first Flickr Meetup yesterday. We went to a pumpkin patch, walked through a corn maze, acquired pumpkins, and shot tiny pumpkins at a target using a slingshot. It was goofy and fun. I'm always shy about meeting new people, even though I'm pretty good at it, so I brought along a couple of my friends (Sean and Susan), and everyone had a good time. The flickr folks remind me a lot of metafilter folks - smart, goofy, and just the right amount of nerdy.
Tonight was Scott's housewarming/birthday party, so Sean and I both brought him pumpkins from the farm.
All in all a good weekend, if a busy one (I fit a few hours of darkroom time in there somewhere too). I wish I didn't have to go back to work tomorrow.
My GPS came yesterday (Garmin eTrex Legend Cx, $184 at Amazon with rebate), so I had to try it out. Here is the procedure I followed:
1) Make sure GPS unit and camera are set to the same clock time.
2) Set GPS options to decimal lat/lon.
3) Walk around with GPS unit recording tracklog.
4) Take photos.
5) Copy digital photos from memory card to hard disc in folder for 2006_10_11.
6) Download and purchase RoboGeo ($35 US).
7) Open photo folder in RoboGeo.
8) Tweak RoboGeo default settings to allow it to "guess" location from in-between points in tracklog.
9) Connect GPS to computer USB port and hit F3 in RoboGeo to have it import the tracklog.
10) Verify that RoboGeo imported coordinates correctly.
11) Use RoboGeo's option to write coordinates to the EXIF tag (overwrites original photos).
12) Select Flickr Upload interface from RoboGeo.
13) Tweak tags to add a few of my own (camera make and model derived directly from EXIF).
14) Click button to upload, and wait a couple minutes for upload to complete.
15) Ta da! Geotagged and mapped photos!
(Not my most artistically exciting photos, but I have a big nature trip planned this weekend to really test this out.)
HDR [High Dynamic Range] photography. Modern software made it easy, amateurs are wowed by the "ooh, shiny!" novelty of it, and it's infecting flickr like a virus. These people have no idea what dynamic range even means, and they're throwing HDR on everything, and it looks awful. I don't have a problem with the technique in general (it's actually an old technique, but it used to take a lot more work to apply), but I think it should be used subtly and only for a good reason.
Just to take 2 random images from the HDR pool on flickr to illustrate what I mean.
I have no problem with this one, because the technique was used to balance out some really difficult lighting conditions (more exposure for the dark hallway, less exposure for the bright skylight). This one and this one just feel all wrong to me, kind of an uncanny valley feeling, like it's just not possible for nature to look like that. At this point, it's not photography anymore; it's computer graphics. And that might be fine for some people. But that's not what I come to flickr to see. Yeah, I'm a curmudgeon. "Just click away!" That's what I do. But this is my blog, so I can rant here.
