Category: Photography

I love photography. For me, it’s like painting, but better. And more accurate. And unlike painting, I can actually participate. I am not a big success or great master by any means. But I enjoy taking pictures. I also enjoy looking at other people work and sometimes sharing it. When I do, this is the category that I use.

Flickr: discover YOUR fetish

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…

Change of perspectives

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.

Continue reading Change of perspectives

Some problems never get old. Or do they?

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.