I’ve been getting vary lax with my photo uploading lately. I’m aiming to catch-up over the upcoming weeks. Here’s the start of the updates.
First up here are some from a long weekend we had in Troon. We had a very wet and windy visit to the nearby wee island of Cumbrae:
In the summer we visited my parents in Teesside and popped down the coast to Runswick Bay:
When my parents visited a few months back we travelled on the train to the Summerlee Heritage Park:
Pretty clunky I know.
What I really want is a way of tweaking my photos online and getting those changes mirrored back locally. Slightly hampered by the fact that my local photos are on my desktop PC, which gets turned on monthly at the moment. Ideally I would have all my photos on some kind of NAS which I could then edit and upload from via my imaginary Macbook Pro and access the NAS remotely from work, pub etc. Oh and NAS should backup into the cloud. For free.
How does this compare to your workflow dear readers?
Last month Ria and I had two weeks in the USA travelling from New York to Boston to Chicago and then back to New York. After travelling ~8,300 miles on 6 flights, 2 rail journeys and numerous subway systems we’d taken a lot of photos. It’s taken me up until now to get photos from New York sorted out and put up online. Here they are:
The trip was amazing! We ate lots of fantastic food, saw great shows, went up tall buildings, drank cocktails, went to zoos, took boat cruises, ate some more food, saw the sites, did shopping and generally stood around looking up and gaping at the tall buildings.
More photos to follow of Chicago and Boston.
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!
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!
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 🙂
Last Sunday we had a “tourist day” with my parents, away from the shops. We went along to the Bo’ness & Kinneil Railway, unsurprisingly, in Bo’ness. My Dad is a bit of a train fan and I think I’ve still got some of it in my blood :). Of course, I wanted to a be a train driver when I was small. Not sure when that phase ended…
Anyway, we rode the train along the line to to Birkhill where the clay mine is. The mine was as good, possibly better than the train journey. There are miles of big tunnels to explore and we were given a tour around just a small section. Our family and especially my Dad as a Director of the NPHT have become quite the mine-tour connoisseurs and we all thought this one was a beauty. The guy who led us around knew his stuff and it was well laid-out and timed well. Just long enough to feel like you’re not getting ripped-off and not too long so you get bored. There’s a gallery up in the pictures section of the days sights. Taking photos underground is always tricky but I tried with a couple.
Kerry and I did a bit of the Make Poverty History march on Saturday and then mooched around the meadows for a bit, soaking up the atmosphere. It did feel good to part of something big, the amount of people involved was huge. When we got back to the Meadows (thinking we were the last to go around) there were still five huge queues of people waiting just to start off! I took lots of photos, which are available to view in pictures. We didn’t see any of the “trouble”. Although when we were waiting for the bus home, five police vans screamed past us towards Buccleuch street, probably something to do with this.
I’ve posted my photos from Rick & Rach’s wedding in the gallery for your viewing pleasure.
The gallery has been having a bit of a scrub lately. Using some mod-rewrite dark magic I’ve made the URLs much nicer and easier to read. Instead of having:
/gallery/index.php?mode=gallery&id=38
we now have:
/gallery/38/
A vast improvement!
The other main change is now when viewing a gallery the page is much simpler. Before I had things like: the image size, resolution, data and the filename. People won’t actually care about those things! All they want is to see all the images and maybe click on one to see a larger version. Working on customer facing e-commerce stuff has taught me a lot about removing barriers to navigation and generally making a users life easier. I figured it’s time I implemented some of it around here.
An article over on EurasiaNet describes the scrap merchants in Kazakhstan who live off space junk that has fallen off soviet rockets. It is accompanied by a photo essay which includes some amazing photos. The one shown is my personal favourite and has a magical feel to it.
James, Alex and I have started up a collaborative blog spotting cool stuff in the satellite photos on google maps. Go take a look.
Update: Well, that was massively more successful than we initially thought. We’ve had over eight hundred submissions and apparently we are using up to much of the server’s resources. We’re currently relocating to a friendlier host.
Update, update: Woo-hoo, we’re back!
I was just cleaning out my camera memory and came across this beauty:
I saw it roughly sprayed on a wall on the promenade down at Portabello in July last year. Someone certainly has a sense of humour.
