CogBlogged Tagged ‘fotography’

Since I am just started playing with taking gigapan images, I was eager to experiment with the device on the trip here in Australia. I dont have fancy case for the thing- I am carting it around in the foam padded cardboard box it got sent to me. I am carrying it in my old backpack with a tripod strapped to the bag: I had a small break Tuesday and wandered down Swantson Street to capture an image of the impressive State Library of Victoria– which always fascniated me with the little bit of Twilight Zone sculpture in front – at least I think it is based on the Time Enough at Last episode with Burgess Meredith: So I tried first for a shot at the front of the library, but it was right into the sun, and I locked in a really poor exposure setting, and had to tweak [...]

Thanks to the precedent setting and helpful nudge of D’Arcy Norman (who did this last year), in 2008, I am pledging myself to take and post to flickr every day a photo that best captures what I as doing, or at least what I photographed that day. As D’Arcy notes, it is not easy, but what it does is (I think) stretches your imagination and skills of photography. So while you can find mine as 2008/366 photo set on flickr, the above slide show below was made with SlideFlickr a free web tool that “will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds.” Slideflickr provides extra options, such as the music track. I went to ccMixter, a fab source for free music, where I rummaged a bit and chose this electronic remix: jaspertine lab sound 3.

Just when you think you’ve seen enough cool flickr add on tools, 20 more pop up in your reader. SlideFlickr is very handy- ir can generate code for emdedding and flickr set into an external web page, but you can also create embeddable shows based on tags an d other parameters. Or as the site says, and it is true- SlideFlickr will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds. Here is one generated in 4 seconds (!) from my Being There presentation / set:

For more than a year I have turned repeatedly to flickr’s creative commons search to locate images for presentations and projects. It never has failed to provide a large number of choices of powerful images to use. The problem is the search tools on flickr are one of their less elegant designed interfaces. You first have to browser/pick via a type of license, and then search. It’s hardly efficient. For a long while, I used FlickrLilli, which provided a single search interface with some buttons/menus to narrow to the appropriate CC license types. But ohhhhhh, that Lilli just got slower and slower to load/respond. Darn popularity! Well, here is a new kid that offers even more! flickrCC This is from the “about” portion.. OK, so I should put more time into documentation, right? I wrote flickrCC so I could easily find photos on flickr that were released under the creative [...]

I’m curious about other flickr users behaviors… When you get an email notice that someone has seleted you as a contact, do you: * immediately accept (“I want to be friends with everybody”) * check out their photos first (“Oh my gawd, they collect photos of ________!”) * wait a while (“I am trying to get some work done!”) * delete and ignore (“Eww, yuck, people!”) I almost thought about titling this, “Are You a Contact Whore?” but that’s a bit tawdry, eh? The reflex is usually one of “Ahh, that makes my ego feel niiiiice, ooooh, more please”, and to take action right away. If I cannot tell who it is (which is hard form flickr user names), I do check them out, but nearly always I reciprocate. Yup, I might be a Contact ______. But this FOAF (Friend of a Friend) concept is an underlying thread to tools [...]

There seems to be no end to the toys, tools, and cool add-ons that flickr spawns, simply by allowing its programming interface to be available to outside developers. The latest, is Splashr, billed humbly as “a tool for presenting Flickr photos.” Flickr, already allows you to create slide shows from your recnt photos, photos from a specific tag, etc, but the slideshow presentation is, well, rather basic. That’s where splashr comes in- you can give it a tag, and/or a flickr account, and then you can choose from a number of HTML or Flash “templates” to form a more elegant, or just different, interface for presenting slideshows. So, for example, there is the simple slideshow flickr does for my photos tagged with nmv2006reg, ones from the NMC Regional Conference, but through Spashr, I can create, for example, a slideshow using the reflector filmstrip (kind of like one of the Keynote [...]

The extent of flickr-ness keeps receding like the edge of the universe. Today, I stumbled upon flickr Scout which allows you to find which of your photos have made it to the spotlight of the flickr Explore! page– on a daily basis, flickr pops here the 500 photos uploaded in one day with the highest level of “interestingness”. The Scout not only finds your photos in this pig pile, but tracks their current level. So of course, it’s all about feeding the ego! I did not think my scouting results would come up with 5, and of these 4 are not ones myself would say are all that interesting (and the one I do like is not the conference bag ;-) 1. Bug On The Road XP 2. Obligatory WIki Photo 3. The Home for the Conference Bag 4. Woohoo! A Ribbon! 5. Daisies And even cooler! The flickr scout [...]

I think this came via TechCrunch- PicLens is a web browser plugin that allows you to view photos form several services ( Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket) and image search results from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com in a full screen mode, that keeps a record of images viewed (an icon strip below). Right now it is available only for Mac OSX and Safari, but it says a Windows version is coming soon. So on any of these sites, PicLens availability is indicated by a special icon superimposed on an image: which can be a single image as shown, or an entire set on flickr. Clicking it pulls up the full screen viewer, previous images are stored at the bottom, and a slide show mode is available: Okay, I am not sure what I might use it for, but it has some potential… I have done some presentations where rather than stifling the [...]

Just be shear, dumb, web clicking serendipity, I came across flickrStorm: FlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr! It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images… Be suprised! Okay, there are scads of flickr search tools, and it’s not exactly clear what this “magic is”, but they certainly have been double dipping their chips in the web 2.0 bowl. More less, you enter a search term and get results as small icons: Clicking the small square icon (it looks like the first set might be the ones by “interestingness”) brings a preview on the right, where you can go to the flickr page for the cute dog picture, or “add to the tray” so it gets saved to a collection on the left. but wait, there’s more. Clicking the “advanced” link brings a drop down menu filter that can help restrict [...]

I cannot say anymore that flickr is not being responsive, after the knock knock post, I got a rather long, and detailed message, with some clarification of NIPSA, why it is there, and some re-assurrances that they are working on ways to flag things with categories for ones that are not photos. NIPSA is all about what turns up in flickr-wide searches: In the meantime, your photos will not show up in global search results. This is not because we hate Second Life, or hate screenshots, or hate you, or have any specific official opinion at all about philosophical questions like “What is a photograph?” or “Where is the dividing line between real and virtual worlds in our brave new digital age?” (personally, I’m sympathetic to the argument that ‘photos’ taken with ‘cameras’ in SL are actually photos). It’s because Flickr is *for* photos. Even when we have support finer-grained [...]