by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 21, 2005 | Photography
I uploaded my first picks to Flickr on the 14th of June so thats just over a month ago.
I obviously was pretty much sold on it back then already since I uploaded 700 photos in the following few days, but now I am realizing other things about Flickr that was not apparent during my poking around on it leading up to the uploading of photos.
Mostly the things I’m realizing are about the community on flickr, people really do contribute, comment, make suggestions, post to the forums etc in a very friendly and accommodating way. In short it’s one of the best photo communities I’ve taken part in.
Some stats on my photos hosted there:
| Number of Views: |
10380 |
| Photos with comments: |
Difficult to say, > 100 |
| Photos that’s been marked as Favorites: |
73 |
| Photos with > 100 views: |
6 |
| Number of Contacts: |
71 |
| People who list me as Contact: |
59 |
There are some other interesting stats but I think this paints the picture, when I had my photos on a Gallery hosted on my own machine I got loads of hits as well but nothing like on Flickr and those hits were mostly driven from Google and very much a hit-and-run type scenario. No-one left comments or anything, I never had any kind of interaction with those viewers, it’s very different on Flickr and that’s the major selling point.
Flickr has the concept of contacts, you add them, they get a mail that you’ve done so and they can see your photos and choose to add you as a contact too. There is a special page that shows a stream of photos uploaded by your contacts and also an RSS feed. This is great for keeping track of peoples work instead of just following a blog since people tend to upload only their best to a photoblog.
Photos can also belong to groups, there are groups for anything you can imagine, so I tend to send photos to groups like People in Black and White, these groups also have discussion forums.
So to sum up, I’m very happy with the $24.95 I spent to get me on Flickr for a year, it’s been great and it’s changed drastically how I work with my photos, even in strange ways like making it easier to publish to my photoblog which means I do it more often. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for casual photo hosting for family and friends and for anyone interested in a community driven site.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 17, 2005 | Photography Equipment
I recently subscribed to The Digital Photography Weblog and I have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of really good stuff I came across there.
People often go on at me about my poor 6 mega pixel camera compared to their 7 or 8 meg pixel point and shoot and why I bother with this expensive camera with such low pixel count.
Well in this article they explain the difference between a DSLR’s 6 meg pixels and that in the shiny point and shoot or worse camera phones, check it out:
The dirty little secret of digital camera sensors is that they capture only monochromatic light intensity, and due to some technical wizardary (hack!) of putting colored glasses, can they guess what color might be relevant for that pixel. This interpolation, it is pretty messy – really – the good news is that larger sensors(SLRs) do a far better job of capturing the light intensity and thus color accuracy.
Well said, sums it up pretty well. They also point to a nice glossary of terms for DSLR’s.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 12, 2005 | Front Page
I’ve taken up cycling again, its been a while since I last cycled anywhere – about 8 or 9 years – and I’m surprised to see I havn’t lost much in speed etc. I manage to do 20 km on a MTB in just over an hour and that’s with stopping and taking 99 photos too. Usually I average around 25 to 30km/hour which seems to be a pretty good speed to get in an urban setting on small back roads and paths.
I have one of these little bicycle computers but I find them a bit limiting, they are only really good for on the spot checks, no good for gauging improvement over time. So last night I took the GPS with and imported the data into OziExplorer which gives me much better view of what is going on. I can see average speeds between specific points of the route, elevation maps and with some add on tools even rate of climb/descent. I’ll store a track file for each time I go cycle and it should give me a good way to gauge if there are any improvement over time in my abilities.
The upshot of having the cycle is that I can get places at times that I wouldn’t have had the ability to get too before, last night for instance I got some great shots along the South Bank on the Thames Path.
For an idea of what OziExplorer gives me here is a screen shot of the track and also speed over distance. Click on it for a full size version.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 1, 2005 | Photography
I made some changes to the workflow for getting photos onto my photoblog. Previously I mentioned using a bit of Perl trickery to get photos posted to my photoblog in a semi automated manner.
I’ve now made this much better since I got my Flickr account. Since all my photos that I’ve edited will end up on Flickr it also means that all photos I post to the blog will be on Flickr.
I wrote something using the Flickr API in Perl to fetch a given image from flickr, get the meta data from it, get the thumbnails that Flickr makes – nice uniformly square ones – and combine all of this into a blog posting. The advantage here is that I can use the very good Flickr UI to edit descriptions and the like relying on the Perl code to just fetch those and publish it to the blog without needing me to duplicate any data entry.
There exists a Flickr::API module for Perl to make this easy but it uses XML::Parser::Lite::Tree to give the data back to the user and I find this quite complex so I am using XML::DOM to parse the XML that Flickr returns and while this is probably more code to write it is much more readable.
The end result is that I’ve changed the layout of posts to be more readable, the shooting data is in a table with some bold’s etc and there is also now a links section that for the moment only points to the Flickr page of the posted photo. I’m also using the square thumbnails from Flickr which saves me time in making my own as well as making my blogs look better since thing’s are always laid out the same with these.
I may post some code samples later, suffice so say the Flickr API is really amazing you can easily skin the whole site into your design.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 17, 2005 | Photography
I’ve finally finished uploading all of my photos that I edited since buying the D70 onto Flickr. I also went through my old gallery site and found all the older ones I had in my Favorites group there, re-edited these and uploaded them too. The grand total is 690 photos.
It was a big job to say the least, it was made even bigger by the fact that for a very long time I used the ‘Save for web’ thing on photoshop, what a bad idea! It strips out Exif information which means it messed up the Calendar View on Flickr.
I previously posted about Image::ExifTool and again it proved to be invaluable to me. It comes with a command line tool for manipulating Exif data which can be used to copy Exif data from one file to another. Thanks to my strict naming conventions I could fetch original Exif information out of the original JPG or NEF file and copy it to the edited files with a very simple for loop:
for i in D*jpg
do
exiftool -TagsFromFile ../../`echo $i|awk '{print toupper($1)}'` $i
done
Ran that in each directory with Exifless JPG files and it got quickly sorted out, very nice!
Flickr provides a number of tools for uploading data to it, what they do not provide is a Unix command line tool but I found one in Flickr::Upload which worked a charm and made uploading and tagging very very easy. Other tools and scripts for Flickr can be found here.
$ flickr_upload –tag london –tag ‘”portobello road”‘ –tag animalsp6290618.jpg
So with this done I’m about to retire my old Gallery – it’s already empty of all photos – so anyone who was subscribed to RSS feeds there will need to change. I’ve created Sets that more or less resemble my old Gallery categories, it seems you cannot make RSS feeds for individual sets, this really is a PITA but you can subscribe to tags, so to see all photos of a specific Tag in a RSS reader you can view my list of Tags and click the ones you want, there are RSS and Atom links in the generated pages for each.
