Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Famagusta Gazette reports that a partial Lunar eclipse will be visible from Cyprus tonight.  For the photography fans among you, it’s probably a good time to review moon photography tips.  The thing to remember is that even though shooting at night, the moon is lit by the sun, which means you’ll need to use pretty much the same settings as for the bright daylight - tele-zoom lens, tripod, f/16, 1/80 - 1/100.  Good luck, and don’t forget to share your pictures after!

Flickr user Amsterdamned! published this compilation - “The Flickr Portrait Gallery Hall of Excellence 2007″.  Click on the image  above to go its Flickr page, which has links to the original images in larger size.  These are so good - they are an absolute must see!

Flickr has recently added support for videos.  Many thought (and some still do) that it was an April Fool’s joke, because the information broke out on the 1st of April, but it seems that it was no joke after all.

When I heard about it, I was a bit surprised, and had a slight negative feeling about it.  Flickr seemed to do just fine as they were.  The photo site community is very different from the video site community. And don’t we already have YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and a tonne of other video sites?  Why Flickr should be spoiled by videos?

But after I spent some time reading about and checking the implementation, I have to say that I like it.  There is a FAQ about this new feature which does a good job explaining the idea behind it.  There are many ways to define what a video is and how it should be handled.  Flickr went for a very nice definition - “a long photo“.  They have imposed a 90 second time limit on all videos, as well as allowed uploads to Pro accounts only for now.  That’s about as right as it could have been done.

Indeed there is a need for short video support on Flickr.  I do have a YouTube account, but it’s not what I need right now.  I am not doing a lot of videos, and the ones I do usually complement the photos nicely.  Most of my videos are very short and rather personal.  For these needs, YouTube is a bit too much with its noisy community, channels, and subscribers.  But Flickr videos seems to be spot on! I suspect there going to be a few changes and adjustments to the current functionality in the near future, but even as it is now, it’s pretty handy.

Have you tried Flickr videos?  What do you think?

While I was walking the streets of Amsterdam, I caught myself many times thinking about how particularly nice the city looks in black and white.  Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of color and brightness in there.  But, the combination of rainy weather and straight lines of strict architecture forms was always suggesting desaturated high contrast black and white imagery.

I wish I was any better in photography.  Maybe then I could have captured the black and white magic of Amsterdam as good as it deserves it.

Here are some excellent images from Flickr which came up in search results.

Here is some excellent food photography (found via Goblin).  Click on the image above for more photos.