Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

(For those of you who don’t know, my mother came to Cyprus last Friday for just a few days to celebrate her birthday.  She is back to Moscow today.)

It was one of the shortest visits so far.  The longest one was when Maxim was born.  Ma stayed with us for a month or so.  There were a few two-weeks and 10-days stays.  There were some 1 week stays.  Those felt short, but we had enough time to pack all the fun in.  With 3 days at hand and all the preparations that had to be done for the actual celebration, we still managed to enjoy plenty of time together.

The celebrations were cool too.  A whole bunch of people, up in the hills with plenty of drinks, food, free time, and good mood - that’s a heck of a combination for great time.  It’s a bit sad that it’s over, but  I’m glad we didn’t spoil a second of it.  It was all fun.

Happy birthday mom.  Hope to see you again soon!

Flickr is fantastic. Although I ran out of my bandwidth limits, I still visit it daily for a fresh portion of visual pleasure.

I am looking through a whole bunch of images daily. Sometimes though, I find something exceptionally perfect. Such images have to bookmarked (or “favourited” in Flickr tongue) immediately.

Every time I come back to my collection of favourites, I discover this or that common trend. It’s interesting to see how a bunch of images that I favourited over some time point me to things about myself that I’ve never noticed.

Today I discovered yet another fetish of mine. I doubt that there is even one word to describe it. Consider these two examples - one and two. (Women, dressed for chilly weather, drinking hot drinks from cups?) I favourited these two images days apart. On closer inspection of my favourites, I’ve also found this image, which is somewhat different in style and execution, but still features the same subjects (woman and cup).

I’ll be watching myself for more…

As I mentioned earlier, I am migrating all my pictures to Flickr.

Previously I was posting only selected images that I considered worthy. It was interesting to see reactions of other people (comments, bookmarks) to those images.

This time, I removed all pictures that I had there, and started from scratch. I started with the oldest albums of 1995, 1996, and so on. I am currently working my way through 2003.

Again, it is interesting to see how other Flickr users react to this images. Since the images I am uploading now are very different (more noise, less post-processing, less quality) from those that I had before, the reactions are different too.

Below are a few examples of what I am talking about.

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A couple of years ago I went through all our (Olga’s and mine) printed photographes, selected the good ones, and ordered scans from the studio, so that I could have them all in digital form. One of the annoying problems I came across when catalogueing those images was the date.

Most images didn’t have any date reference what-so-ever, so I had to guess when it was or date these images as very uproximate. Others, did have a date added by the camera. The problem though, was that in many cases, the date was way off. That’s because the camera was never properly configured (users hate manuals).

Today, while importing images to Flickr I realized that the same problem applies to digital cameras too. Many images in my gallery had a really wrong timestamp in the EXIF data. Useless. Good thing I was keeping them in the directory structure, which referenced the date (2005/2005-04-15_My_birthday). I could easily fix it with a tiny script.

This got me thinking. How can the problem be solved once and for all? Is it even possible? Is there a way for digital camera to know what time it is, without user telling it? How about people who travel a lot - do they have to reconfigure their cameras at every time zone?

The travelling bit gave me an idea - GPS. Some cameras already use GPS to add geolocation coordinates to the meta data of the picture. But GPS receivers can be also used for maintaining the precise clock, which can be autoconfigured, and autoconfigured with time zone of the actual camera location. This is sweet!

Hopefully Canon (and other vendors who I don’t care about) already does it, or plans to do it in the nearest future. That could be an excellent technology application - useful, and invisible to the user. Just as it should be.

For the last few days I’ve been playing with fd’s Flickr Toys. It is an excellent set of simple applications that allow one to utilize a tremendous collection of images - Flickr - in a totally new way.

Basically, you can choose any image from Flickr and easily transform it into magazine cover, billboard picture, inspiration frame, calendar picture, stamp, etc. There are plenty of transformations available and they are really easy to use - just a couple of mouse clicks.

If you are a registered Flickr user, there are even more options for you. There are some games available, like, for example, the one for naming your contacts - you are shown a picture made by one of your contacts and given a choice of three options. You also get an option of uploading resulting images directly to your photostream.

Check this one out - it can grab your attention for some time.

P.S.: I liked some results so much that I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account. You can see them all here (tagged with “fdsflickrtoys”). There are many picture transformations done by other Flickr users too. You can find them all here.