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.

I am busy, yet I have too much time on my hands

Paradox – I am busy, but I decided that I have too much time on my hands. Actually, I didn’t specifically just decided it. What I decided was that I am going to do a couple of other projects, although I am already pretty occupied right now.

I have a reputation of a starter, you know. I enthusiastically start a lot of things. But I rarely finish them. In most cases, the moment I can imagine the end of a project, or the moment I fully understand how it works and how to implement it, I lose interest in it.

I am surrounded by zombie projects. Yet I will start two more.

The first one has something to do with podcasting. In fact, it has everything to do with podcasting. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, and my inspiration was building up. I am going to do my own podcast. This will be mainly for two reasons – to improve my spoken English, and to teach me more about podcasting in general and sound editing in particular. And, the truth is, if I really want to do something – I don’t need any reasons to do it. And I want to podcast.

The second one is about photography. I decided that I became way too lazy with my photographic equipment and skills. I have to re-enthusiate myself. ‘Picture of the week’ project has been done, and I am not interested in another one. What I am interested instead is something similar, but different enough to get me focused. I will do a project on Cyprus (Limassol mostly) for which I’ll be taking pictures of people. Not only this will push me forward in my studies of photography, but it will teach me some psychology – street photography (and that’s what I am going to be doing) takes a lot of nerve. If you don’t believe me – try it yourself. Or ask any other photographer.

I am not starting any of these projects right now. I’ll need a day or two to think them over and decide what’s the best way to proceed.

Re: digitally tagging height

This is my response to this post in Sanjay’s blog. I originally wrote this as a comment, but before I pressed “Submit” button, I thought that it would be better to have it here, with all the crosslinks.

Sanjay noticed that pictures like the one of Maxim on his birthday are a cool new way of saving height measurements. That is instead of using old ways of pen, rule, and wall. He regrets only that there is no date and time information on the picture.

Well, that’s not a problem at all, my dear friend! Most of the modern digital cameras save a lot of meta information in the image file. With right tools that information is trivial to extract (Google search for “EXIF”).

I put a bit more thought into the idea and realized that it can actually be much more fun. With data and time of the image available from the image file itself, we are missing only one bit for a complete picture – the age of a child. Since there is no automatic way of getting it, a human interaction is necessary.

And where there is human interaction, there is social interaction. Flickr comes to mind. Consider this for a moment:

Parents make pictures of their kids against a height meter. Then, they upload these images to Flickr. Then, they tag these images with three tags. One tag for the age of the child, say “age14month” or “age2years”. One tag for the height itself, say “76cm” or “132cm”. And one additional tag to make these pictures easy to find, say “kidsgrow”. Maybe an image pool or user group would be a better way of goind about it.

With setup like this, there is a central location, where all such images are stored (backup). People can then easily find all pictures of their own kids, as well as other kids of the same age or the same height.

There are also a whole bunch of third-party applications that can utilize data from Flickr, like, for example, fd’s Flickr Toys.

How do you like the sound of that?

Maxim and the polar bear

Maxim and the polar bear

In the morning, my brother and I went for a perilous journey. We had to drive a really old car (“don’t live the city borders in the piece of machinery” type) in heavy rain and limited visibility conditions to Larnaca airport, where we had to pick up an unknown guy, who we had to bring back to Limassol and make and exchange with. This poor soul was a yachtsmen. He had to get to his team and we were his only hope. Team’s coach had a valuable posession for us. It was a package from my father.

Overcoming obstacles one by one, which were many by the way, we managed to succeed in our quest and get the package. In it, there was plenty of stuff. Most of it was for Maxim – books and a giant polar bear. Soft. And huge. He was exactly the size of Maxim.

Maxim showed a more than average level of excitement. He played with the bear, talked to him, and took him for a walk. He even wrestled him to the ground and than picked up into the air – that was a particularly hard thing to do, which you can witness from the pictures in the album.

Thanks Dad – very much appreciated. And vodka too, by the way.

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-02-08_POTD