Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I’ve been an amateur shutterbug for years.
According to the Bumbershoot website:
What is the camera policy at Bumbershoot?
Cameras are not allowed at Bumbershoot—please leave them at home.
So, there’s no public photography allowed at Bumbershoot this year?
The best word I can come up with for this is ludicrous.
Anyone out there have any more info? What’s the deal here? And how are they going to be enforcing it?
(And anyone feel like getting together on one of the days and blatantly defying the ban?)
(via Seattle Metroblogging)
I’m probably one of the last people to actually make mention of this, but the big news in the Flickrverse over the past few days has been the introduction of two new features: tag clusters and ‘interestingness’.
Tag clusters are a great addition, analyzing photos by all the tags associated with them and then ‘clustering’ them with other photos with similar groups of tags. This allows for distinguishing photos of feline tigers from operating systems code named tiger, even though they both share the common ‘tiger‘ tag.
‘Interestingness‘ is much more vague. Here’s how Flickr explains it:
There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.
In a sense, it works in a somewhat similar method to Google’s Pagerank system, using community interaction with the photos to determine what’s catching the communal eye at any given point. Page views, number of comments, how many people have marked a photo as a favorite, and the tags and groups a photo is assigned to seem to play a part in how ‘interesting’ it is deemed. Obviously, this isn’t a qualitative ranking of the photo itself, and shouldn’t be seen that way, but it’s a very nifty way to go bouncing through the Flickrverse and discover photos you might not have found otherwise.
Each user has now gained a list of their top 200 ‘most interesting’ photos as determined by the system. I was somewhat amused to check mine and find that of my top five, only one of them is actually a picture that I’ve taken — the other four are screenshots or satellite photos from other sources. I think I’ve got a lot more photos that are a lot more interesting than those — but then, a computer algorithm is only going to do so well at figuring this stuff out.
Here, then, are my current top five ‘most interesting’ photos:
And, for entertainment purposes, my current ‘least interesting’ photos (though these change more frequently, and as the ranking only counts 200 out of the 3492 photos I’ve uploaded so far, I guess they still count as pretty interesting…programmatically, at least):
“Somebody” by Veruca Salt from the album For the Masses: A Tribute to Depeche Mode (1998, 4:05).
A quick Mac OS X tip for photographers that I’ve found to be really handy in instances where you’d like to get an idea of how those color shots from your digital camera would look like when converted to black and white.
When you have your latest photos displayed in iPhoto (or whatever photo management software you use), just go to System Preferences > Universal Access and click the Use grayscale checkbox.
Your entire display will switch to greyscale mode, and you can flip through your entire photo album to get an idea of which shots work in black and white and which don’t without having to tweak each photo that might work one-by-one. Obviously, it’s probably simple desaturation and not the same quality you’d get using Photoshop’s channel mixer or some other fancier technique, but it’s quite handy for a quick overview to narrow down which shots are the best candidates for black and white work.
“Running Wild” by Soup Dragons, The from the album Hotwired (1992, 4:02).
I was having a good day wandering around Myrtle Edwards Park for the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s festivities until someone sicced the security goons on me. Apparently a parent had decided that since I was taking pictures of kids playing in the surf at one of the small beach areas, I was some creepy scumbag who had to be brought to heel.
One security guy came up to me and pulled me aside, telling me that there had been complaints that I was taking pictures of children.
“Were you taking pictures of children?”
Well, yeah, I had been, along with quite a few other things. Knowing this was a battle I wasn’t about to win, I offered to delete the photos.
“Can I see your camera?”
I pulled up the picture display and scrolled to the most recent shots. Sure enough, there was the damning evidence — pictures of fully-clothed children, playing in the surf on a public beach during a public festival. He keyed his intercom and called another security guard over to look at the shots.
The two of them flipped through the shots, shaking their heads. Obviously, I was Bad People and had to be Brought Under Control. After watching me delete all the offending photos from my camera, they explained to me that while they couldn’t really prevent me from taking pictures, they would certainly be keeping an eye on me if I chose to remain in the area. “We’ll be watching you.”
That being quite the mood-killer, I figured it was best just to leave.
Now, before anyone accuses me of being too self-righteous, what bugs me the most isn’t that some parent might have been a little alarmed about some strange man taking pictures of their kid. What annoys me is the “guilty until proven innocent” mentality that prompted them to run to security instead of approaching me and either asking what I was doing or, if I’d taken any shots of their kid, to delete them. The same mentality that made the security personnel treat me as if in their minds, I was there for the sole purpose of taking pictures of children to go home and masturbate to (regardless of the many other shots of landscapes, water, Mt. Ranier, the Seattle skyline, and the tripod slung over my shoulder for fireworks shots later on in the evening). The same attitude that finished the little interview — after I’d voluntarily deleted all the shots, with them looking over my shoulder — with the warning that, “we’ll be watching you.”
So, I’m back at home. I’ve got a ticket to watch Batman in about half an hour, and then I’ll see if I feel like wandering back down there to try to get some shots of the fireworks or not.
Happy Fourth of July everyone. You know — independence, liberty, freedom, and civil rights and all that.
Last night I made a rare mid-week visit to the Vogue, as they were having a fundraiser for the local goth community’s entry into this Sunday’s Pride parade. It gave me a chance to play a little bit with low-light photography, experimenting with various shutter speeds to see if I could get anything decent at the club.
Some shots worked better than others, of course (trial and error will do that). I brought along a monopod, which allowed me to me to go for two- to four-second exposures without too much camera shake. A tripod would have been better, but it would have been a lot bulkier and a lot more difficult to adjust quickly. The resulting shots aren’t my greatest, but I’m not unhappy with them at all — it was fun to try, and I’ve got a better idea of what settings to use the next time I get a chance for something like this.
The one bummer was that as the actual fundraiser part of the show started late (scheduled for 10:30pm, they didn’t get going until about 11:15pm), I only got a chance to shoot three of the burlesque dancers before I had to leave. By the time I had found settings that were working pretty well (half-second exposure, front-curtain flash, focus fixed at just over two meters), the three of them were done and I needed to be getting home.
Still, it was fun to experiment with, and I got some time to bounce around on the dance floor for a bit. I’d been missing that, as the past two weekends have been too busy for me to make it out on Saturday night, and I don’t think I’ll be making it out this Saturday, either. Sunday’s the Pride parade, and Prairie and I will be heading up to watch that along with Rick and Kirsten and her husband; and on Saturday we’re planning on heading out to the Utilikilt Anniversary picnic.
Looks to be another busy weekend lined up. Yay for summer!
A few questions about iPhoto — things that don’t make sense to me.
When I drag photos from an archive on DVD into my local photo library in order to export them, why can’t iPhoto keep track of the correct tags? While the tags are fine in the archive, as soon as I copy them into the main library, the photos end up tagged semi-randomly, usually with only one or two tags (and those often seem to be “wedding” and “family”, for some reason).
What is iPhoto doing when it loads an archive from DVD that was created with an older version of iPhoto and it presents you with the “Updating iPhoto Library” dialog box? Obviously, it can’t be updating the database on the DVD, that’s write-only media. I think that it’s creating an updated copy of the archive’s database on the hard drive to use, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t it save that archive for later use? It seems to me that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to do that, and yet every time I try to load an archived photo library, I have to sit and wait for iPhoto to think.
Thanks to these three issues, I may end up re-importing my three DVDs of archived photos so that they’re all on my hard drive — and then hope that having all the photos available doesn’t slog iPhoto down too terribly. Not my preferred approach (especially as, given issue number two, I’d likely have to go through and re-tag all the photos), but as it is, I dread having to go back to old photo archives.
“Shining Star” by Earth Wind and Fire from the album Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975 (1974, 2:50).
Okay, so maybe this whole brouhaha about Flickr being purchased by Yahoo wasn’t such a bad thing after all. They’ve been on a pretty good roll recently, as evidenced by their news page (which I’m quoting liberally from here, as they don’t seem to have permalinks)…
10th May, 2005
Remember the 5MB limit per photo for your uploads? That was the olden days! Now pro account users can upload photos of up to 10MB each (while, perhaps, cursing their ISP for the slow upload connection – in this age of the two web, why the asynchronousness, o ISPs?)
11th May, 2005
IPTC support (finally)! Friends, today there’s another good thing in Flickrland, and that’s support for IPTC data embedded into your photos. Keywords become tags! Captions become descriptions! Marvel as one framework’s terminology is swapped for another! Smile as the location fields in IPTC become Flickr tags!
12th May, 2005
We’ll we’ve gone and done it. In answer to countless requests, photo pages no longer use a Macromedia Flash wrapper to display photos; instead we are using an old technology called “DHTML.”
In addition, the “Send to Group,” “Add to Set,” and “Blog This” buttons above photos now allow you to perform relevant actions right there on the page!
And also, links now work in notes! (And we’ll soon be adding some more cool auto-linking features when the links point to Flickr pages.)
Also rolled into this release are a whole lot of little tweaks and fixes that should make your photo page viewing more enjoyable all around.
Pretty nifty! Poking around with it, I like the changes they’ve made (especially being able to put links within notes), and there have been hints dropped that there might be more goodies coming up. Bring ’em on!
“If Your Kisses Can’t Hold the Man You Love” by Rasputina from the album Frustration Plantation (2004, 3:07).
Back when it was formally announced that Flickr was being bought by Yahoo!, they mentioned that those of us who’d already paid for Pro accounts would be getting super mega bonuses as a reward. Word finally came out today on just what those bonuses are…
Everyone who already purchased a Pro account at the old price ($41.77) prior to the switchover today, will receive the following upgrades:
- If you have a 1 year pro account it will be extended to 2 years (if you bought a 2 year Pro account it will be extended to 4 years)
2 invites for 1 year Pro accounts to be given to anybody you want to give them to (that is, anybody except people who’ve already got a paid Flickr account, and/or yourself).
[…] Also, Pro accounts now get 2 GB a month in uploads, up from a mere 1 GB previously. This of course applies to existing Pro accounts too.
Pretty good deal!
Now I just need to figure out who to give those two freebie Pro accounts to…
“Minas Tirith” by del Maestro, Ben/Shore, Howard from the album Lord of the Rings, The: The Return of the King (2003, 3:37).
Looks like another Seattle-area shutterbug has run into more bogus “no photography” harassment from heavy-handed officials. This time, Alex Williams had his digital film card confiscated after taking pictures at the Pioneer Square bus station.
On Saturday, 4/9/2005, a friend and I were photographing inside Pioneer Square Bus Station when we were stopped by a King County Sheriff’s Deputy and Transit Authority Police Officer and told what we were doing was illegal, and that the area was considered restricted.
I asked the officers explicitly if we were breaking the law. To which the Transit Authority Officer responded, “There’s no law, It’s just sort of an unwritten rule.” The Deputy rebuked my friend and me for not using common sense and repeatedly mentioned the word “terrorism”. The Deputy then confiscated my digital film and informed me that the compact flash cards would be sent to a lab to see what was on them. I offered to format the cards while he watched but he refused.
I did not receive a ticket or citation or receipt for my belongings. On parting, the officer asked if I had any questions, and I politely suggested that they may want to put signs up letting people know that it was illegal to photograph here. To which, he responded, they weren’t “going to waste time posting signs for something that’s common knowledge.”
I found out about this because as Alex researched similar instances after his encounter, he found and linked to my post about Ian Spears problems photographing the Ballard Locks last summer, which then popped up in my referer logs.
One bright side to Alex’ experience, though — after contacting a few people, his story will be on tonight’s 5:30pm KOMO 4 news broadcast.
UPDATE! (4/11/2005)
I emailed KOMO 4 news early this morning and got a prompt photocall from Molly Shen, reporter. The news crew arrived this morning and interviewed me for a story scheduled to air at 5:30pm today.Molly had already done an impressive amout of work by the time she arrived. She talked with King County Sheriff’s officials and found out that it was, in fact, inappropriate for the Officer to confiscate my equipment. She was told that my equipment would be returned as soon as possible. Thanks, Molly!
I won’t be able to watch the broadcast, but I’ll keep an eye on the KOMO site and see if they post it online this evening.
Update: KOMO has posted their story online.
The rumors were true, as it turns out, and the official announcement was made today on the FlickrBlog: Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr.
Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!
While I’m sure this is good news for both Yahoo! and Flickr, I have to admit that in some ways, I’m a little less than thrilled that Yahoo! is the winning buyer. While the Flickr post assures us that “nothing will change”, that’s the mantra we get every time there’s a merger of this sort, and I just hope it’s true.
My main concern is simply that I’ve never been overly impressed with Yahoo’s Mac support. The main offenders are Yahoo! Messenger — admittedly, a downloadable program and not a web-based offering — and Yahoo! Chat. The Mac version of Yahoo! Messenger has perpetually lagged years behind the PC version in terms of what features it offers, and I’ve never been able to get Yahoo! Chat to work reliably under Mac OS X.
Flickr, on the other hand, has worked flawlessly for me from day one, I quite happily paid to upgrade to a Pro account some time back, and was just recommending them to my brother last night when he and I were talking about how horrendously slow the family photo gallery hosted on my server can be (I can only afford so much bandwidth, after all).
Still, I’m not about to entirely write them off — as I’ve said, Flickr’s ben great so far, and I’m hoping that the acquisition by Yahoo! will be primarily a case of Yahoo! getting to add an incredible set of services to their system, and not one of Flickr being forced to dumb things down to coddle the lowest common denominator of Yahoo! subscribers.
Besides, I’m very curious about this section of the post aimed at those of us who have already paid for Pro accounts:
I liked Flickr BEFORE you even heard of it!
You shall be recognized for your discerning taste in web sites!! I bet you also liked the Flaming Lips before they appeared on Beverly Hills 90210, and for that we salute you. Pro account holders will get super mega bonuses, to be announced soon.
Super mega bonuses, huh? Gotta like the sound of that!
(via Jonas)
Update: Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny has some encouraging things to say about the merger:
The first time I used Flickr, I knew it was something different and something important. It took me a while to figure out and try to articulate exactly what that was, but I took my first swipe back in September when I called it a Next Generation Web Service.
[…]
Since then a lot has happened and I’ve had the chance to meet the Flickr team a few times. That has only convinced me even more that they have what it takes to really change things. Combining their mix of tagging, communities, syndication, open APIs, and interactive UI with Yahoo’s services and millions of users will lead to even more great stuff.
As Caterina wrote, this isn’t about just throwing millions of users at Flickr or bolting Flickr onto Yahoo! Photos. Think more deeply about it. There are many parts of Yahoo that will be Flickrized in the coming months. And with more resources available, Flickr itself will be able to grow like never before.
Sounds like the concerns I’ve brought up are rather well-known in the Yahoo!/Flickr camps, which is encouraging. Time to just sit back and see where things go from here.
(via Stewart in FlickrCentral)
“Medusa Bitch (cry.on.my.console)” by Prodigy, The from the album Always Outsiders Never Outdone (2004, 2:37).