Photography

I’ve been an amateur shutterbug for years.

It’s official: Flickr now part of Yahoo!

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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)

iTunes “Medusa Bitch (cry.on.my.console)” by Prodigy, The from the album Always Outsiders Never Outdone (2004, 2:37).

Cards, anyone?

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Arboretum, Seattle, WA I got a nice compliment from mom on one of my recent photos earlier today:

You sure have some beautiful photos. You could open a side business (in your spare time) selling them for cards.

Thanks mom!

This makes me curious, though….

Might this be a viable idea? While I’m still not sure I’d call myself a “photographer” — I generally tend to prefer “some guy with a camera” — I do think that I do occasionally manage to get some pretty decent shots. If I could find a good way to produce cards or prints, anyone think there might be an interest?

And if so…any ideas where to look as far as vendors go? I know CafePress is one option — I’m using them now (if you can call the five or six sales I’ve made so far “using”) for my I’m Just Here to Get Laid, I’m Too Sexy for My Blog and I’m Too Sexy for Your Blog t-shirts, but the profit margin is so miniscule there that I’m not really sure I see using it for anything more than the occasional hobbyist cute idea (like the aforementioned t-shirts). Of course, if anyone is using CafePress more seriously than I am and finds it worthwhile, feel free to let me know. Any options other than CafePress?

I’m not entirely sure how seriously I’m thinking about this just now, but it’s at least worth poking around at a bit to see what I can find out.

iTunes “Attached” by Orbital from the album Snivilisation (1994, 12:25).

Kubrickr

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Here’s a nifty toy for all you WordPress users that have recently updated to v1.5 and are using the default ‘Kubrick‘ theme: Kubrickr. Given a tag, it will search Flickr for all licensed photos with that tag and then allow you to crop the photo down to create a replacement header graphic that drops right into the Kubrick layout.

Quite nifty, and given that there’s something of a glut of Kubrick-themed sites right now (don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice template…I should know, I’ve seen it often enough), this should help ease the monotony a bit.

(via Matt)

iTunes “Dead Souls (Live)” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Familiar Sting (1994, 6:15).

New camera!

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The day finally came when I had enough funds available to replace the camera I lost nearly a year ago.

My new toy: a Canon PowerShot A95. I’ve only had it for about a day now — Prairie and I picked it up yesterday — so I’ve still got a lot of leaning to go, but so far, I’m very happy with my new lil’ toy. Small enough to fit in a pocket, so I’ll be able to carry it around with me all the time and have it handy at a moments notice, solidly built, lots of options and buttons to learn, a handy little flip-screen display, and 5 megapixel resolution.

Prairie and me, Seattle, WA

Puke! Puke! Puke!

Plus, this lil’ guy can even take short video clips! This was something I had to play with, so I made a short little one-minute movie taking a look at a silly little M&M dispenser that Prairie got me. iMovie was able to compress it down to about 1.5Mb, so it shouldn’t take too terribly long to download. There’s not much to it — mostly just me being silly — but it was certainly worth a few minutes of playing around.

Hooray for new toys!

Oh, and Rick — you can come pick up your camera now. Many, many thanks for letting me borrow it for nearly a year!

iTunes “Central Reservation (Ibadan Spiritual Life Radio Edit)” by Orton, Beth from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. III (1999, 4:00).

Engine Ice

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Engine Ice

This picture wasn’t taken by me, I just thought it was incredibly cool! A friend forwarded it to me along with the accompanying text explanation.

“We had a mixed-precip event last night as the temperatures started rising above freezing and the snow changed over. The ramp was a sheet of slick wet ice, and even with crushed stone (urea) spread, it was glazing over as quickly as we could deploy it. As flight 1830 was coming into the stand, I motioned to the deck for them to proceed very cautiously, which apparently they’d been doing for the whole taxi (it took a long time between calling on-deck and getting to the gate).

When it finally pulled in, we noticed what is in the attached picture. None of us had ever seen it before. Very cool. I ran and grabbed my camera. I apologize for the quality, since it was melting off quickly as the fan had stopped spinning I just pulled out the camera and took two quick snaps. I guess I didn’t have a steady hand in the rain!”

(via The Usual Suspects)

My best photos of 2004

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Seattle, WA

I’ve just created a flickr photoset of my favorite photographs from this past year (hey, every news organization on the planet does this, I might as well join in the fun, right?).

Seventy-nine photos culled from a little over four thousand. Some have been featured on this weblog in the past, some were already on flickr, but quite a few of them are being posted publicly for the first time. I had fun picking out which ones to toss up — hopefully you enjoy looking through them.

Enjoy the show!

Panoramic Experiments

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Yesterday afternoon I decided to go for a bit of a wander through the weekend downtown shoppers to work on an experiment I’ve had in mind for a bit.

I’ve found over the months that I’ve been using it that the camera I’m currently borrowing does really well at evening, low-light photography, dropping the shutter speed down to do so. I’ve been curious at how panoramic shots would turn out if I took them in the evening, where the long exposures would blur any cars and passing shoppers.

After some experimenting yesterday, I’m somewhat pleased by the results, though I definitely still have some tweaking to do before I come up with something I really like. The issues I’m running into are twofold.

First, I need to try to track down some information on this camera and how to use the manual mode. Last night I left the camera on fully automatic, which works well for single shots. However, as it’s metering separately for each shot, I’m ending up with brightness and color shifts when I stitch the panoramas together. I think I should be able to compensate for this by noting the settings the camera chooses for the first shot on automatic mode, then switch to manual mode to duplicate those settings for the rest of the shots.

Secondly, I’m still figuring out the settings for the stitching software I’m using. I’ve been taking the shots with the camera positioned for portrait (vertical) shots — it takes more shots to create a full 360° panorama, but there’s more vertical image in the final panorama. However, this also means that there’s more distortion at the top and bottom of each image, so while the final panoramas are close to seamless across the middle of the shot, there are occasional artifacts (such as buildings or poles suddenly splitting in two) at the top and bottom of each panoramic.

Still, I like the direction that these are going, and each time I try, I’m getting a bit closer to what I’m aiming for in my head.

Here’s the best of my experiments from last night:

4th and Pine, kitty-corner from the Bon

4th and Pine

This is actually pretty close to what I had in my head, aside from the color shifts. One thing I didn’t think about ahead of time that amuses me in the final image is that of the four stoplights in the shot, two are green, one is yellow, and one is red. Seems a wee bit confusing for the drivers!

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.7Mb): westlake2.mov.

Pike Place Market Main Entrance

Pike Place Market Main Entrance

Standing in front of the famous fish market, surrounded by Christmas shoppers. Lots of movement in this one.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (2.5Mb): pikeplace2.mov.

Pike Place Market Flower Stands

Pike Place Flower Stands

In one of the side entrances to the market, right between two of the flower vendors. I like the sudden switch between the bright bustle of the market itself and the darker outside world.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.4Mb): pikeplace4.mov.

Pike Place Market and Waterfront

Pike Place and Waterfront

Outside the far end of the Market, looking over the waterfront. I think this one’s probably my favorite of the batch (of course, it’s also probably the one with the least amount of odd artifacts).

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.5Mb): pikeplace5.mov.

Waterfront and Seattle skyline

Waterfront and skyline

Standing on top of a picnic table in the park directly behind the Market, overlooking the waterfront, the Alaska Way Viaduct, and catching part of the downtown Seattle skyline.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.6Mb): waterfront2.mov.

And that’s it for this round of experiments. More (and hopefully better quality images) will follow later on, I’m sure.

iTunes “Hard Day Blues” by Waters, Muddy from the album Folk, Gospel and Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1946, 2:51).

Lunar eclipse, Seattle, WA

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Lunar eclipse, Seattle, WA

After finding out about tonight’s eclipse earlier today, I started wondering if I could get any halfway decent shots of it. Since the camera I’m using allows longer exposures (up to eight seconds), I figured it’d be worth a shot.

First priority, though, was a tripod, as there was no way I was going to be able to hold my hands perfectly steady through an eight second exposure. I swung through the Kit’s Camera after work, picked up a cheap-but-functional tripod (the Quantaray QXS 2001, for \$19.99), and declared myself ready to go.

Once the eclipse started and the moon rose enough that I could see it over the buildings, I climbed up the fire escape to the roof of my building and started experimenting. It took some fiddling around before I got something useable — it’s been far too many years since I took a photography class, and I really haven’t got a clue about f-stops, apertures, or any of the rest of that professional mumbo-jumbo — but eventually, I managed to get a few that were decent. Not great — but decent (hey, a 3X zoom lens can only get you so close…).

Still, I’m rather happy with them — and I’ve got until 2007 to practice for the next lunar eclipse, anyway. ;)

iTunes “Ain’t Necessarily So” by Bronski Beat from the album Singles Collection 1984-1990, The (1990, 4:08).

Seattle Storm victory rally

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Seattle Storm victory rally, Westlake Plaza, Seattle, WAAs I walked out of the building for lunch today, I heard some sort of big ruckus going on down towards Westlake Center. Being fond of ruckuses (ruckusi?) in general, I made a quick run back to the apartment to grab my camera, and then went back towards Westlake.

Turns out that there was a rally going on celebrating the Seattle Storm‘s recent WNBA championship win.

Now, I’m no big fan of sports in general, but it was fun to wander around the rally for a while. Local cover band The Hit Explosion was playing a surprisingly good set of 70’s disco and funk (amusingly, I think they played just about the entire Muppets From Space soundtrack), so the background music was quite bearable, and it was a fairly welcome break from the usual day-to-day routine.

Some photos from the day are in this flickr photoset, as usual.

Yet another set of library photos

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Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA

While the new Seattle Central Library has been the subject of so many photosets across the Seattle blogosphere that it’s likely well on its way to becoming passé, I had to have my day.

Continuing with my experimentation with flickr (which I’m liking more and more), I’ve uploaded the best eight of my library photos to my flickr page.

Enjoy (if you’re not overloaded on giant metal diamonds already)!

(Originally uploaded by djwudi)