Archive for the 'Photography' Category

It has been almost a month since Ria and I were in Paris and I’m only just blogging about it. My excuse? I’ve been busy!

We flew out from Edinburgh on a Wednesday and stayed all the way through until Sunday. Not too short, but also not too long. We stayed in an Apart-Hotel, basically a hotel room with an attached wee kitchen. It was a pretty good size and superbly located just off the Rue de Rivoli, about 2 minutes walk from the Louvre.

We managed to cram in a lot of sights: Musée d’Orsay, Eiffel Tower, Palais Royale, Rodin Museum, Musée des Arts et Métiers (science & technology), The Louvre, Cathédrale Notre Dame, cruise on the Seine, Musée Carnavalet, Sacre Coeur, Pompidou Centre, the cafe from Amelie, Montmartre, crazy bookshops and of course, lots of sitting drinking coffee and watching the world go by.

Being a geek, I took along my Bluetooth GPS receiver and had it logging when I remembered to turn it on. You can see an amalgamation of our wandering on Google Maps here. The crazy straight lines are when we descending into the Metro and then popped up somewhere else.

I have rather a lot of photos on Flickr, so here are some of my favourites:

Browse the rest of photos…

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Animoto generates “shorts” compiled from your photos and set to music. They render lots of fancy effects, using your photos, apparently in time to the music. Pretty neat!

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So I notice that flickr have had an interface re-design away from using bits of flash and into the oh so fashionable realm of AJAX. The drop-down menus at the top remind me a little of the Office 97 menus which (back then) totally destroyed the idea that Microsoft have any kind of UI guidlines or consistency. But hey, its all good. Even more things happen instantly with out a page load, the new organizr is a work of art and the new user inspector popup thing is way cool.

Last week whilst on a Flickr uploading spree of my Beltane photos I hit the free account photo set limit and bought a Pro account, it was just too easy, and they took paypal. My grand scheme (aside from the volcano lair) is to make Edinburgh Urban Art (currently languishing in ‘forgotten’ land) a super-awesome front end onto flickr using the API. I’m not even sure what I want is possible with the API but any kind of easy user collaboration will be better than its current state. To start the ball rolling in this direction I’ve founded an Edinburgh Street Art group to collate all the fantastic stuff we see around the city. Get uploading!

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Awesome pictures of underground Britain

Update: Uh-oh, they’ve exceeded their bandwidth

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I had the afternoon off yesterday as it was Kerry and Is second anniversary. We went to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Bresson was a photographer who craved anonymity and would never stage photographs; instead he wanted what he famously called the “decisive moment”, when the click of the camera captures a moment of unexpected drama. He was brilliant at catching this decisive moment, illustrated perfectly in the photo to the left. He manages to get the shot when the guy has both feet off the ground above the puddle. The exhibition was good, it wasn’t just photos taken by Bresson. It had photos of him and other biographical photos and items to view. It was a little pricey at £5 but hey, it was a treat. Magnum have all the photos Bresson took whilst working for them online to browse (and buy). After the exhibition we dodged a torrential summer downpour and got expensive ready meals and fizzy blackberry wine from M&S for dinner. A great way to spend an afternoon off.

Update: Looks like Joe beat me to the Cartier exhibition

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