Now that I’m back from the sun, sand & surf of Mexico it’s time to do some web house keeping. First up on the agenda – the official launch of Digital Photography Hints. This is my site dedicated to sharing any useful photo tips that I come across while spending most of my non-laptop life behind my cameras. Have a gander and let me know your thoughts.
Tag: photos
To sleep, perchance parler Français
I guess I’ve been in Montréal a while now… I woke up this morning in the middle of a weird dream in which everyone was speaking French, including me. So when I tried to remember what the dream was actually about – something to do with baby rabbits – I had no idea what anyone in the dream had said… Zut alors.
All of that is pretty encouraging, but don’t expect my blog to suddenly become bi-lingual! If you want to read it in French please feel free to chuck it into Babel Fish or some other online translation engine.
The reason for this sudden influx of french-osity (and rabbits) to my dreams was most likely from spending most of yesterday taking photos for Chocolat in Outremont, the French quarter of Montréal. The owners of the stores I had to take photos of generally didn’t speak English, so for once I was forced to chat away in ‘French’ – or Franglais more like. All in all a fun day, as Outremont is a lovely area, it was beautifully sunny day and I got to eat a lovely lunch of sardines on thin pizza. Mmmm, fishy.
Today I’m still suffering from my photographic wanderings, combined with a solid three day weekend spent labouring over a hot paint roller. The kitchen, hall and bathroom are now looking much more together, barring a few last details. The doors are white for the first time in years, with no grubby hand marks or worn paint – and that in itself is something of a miracle. The other miracle being the discovery of the missing bathroom extractor fan… not sure how one can loose such a thing, but apparently you can.
Flickr’d In 24 Hours
Hunting Comics
Originally uploaded by ultrahi.
A few weeks ago, well just before 5th May to be precise, Flickr started to prepare its members for their first ‘24 Hours of Flickr‘ event. This group had one simple goal – to take photos on 5th May, whatever you’re doing, then to choose the best and add it to the group. Then the lovely folks over at Flickr make their picks and put them in a book commerating the day, which you can either buy or enjoy a free copy if your photo gets chosen.
Nice idea, although Fotolog already did something similar but with all the photos on their site. Personally I think I prefer Fotolog’s approach, as I was having a ‘bad photo day’ on the 5th and wasn’t particularly inspired with any of my pics.
Anyways, after much cogimatation I chose the photo above which pretty much represents the lazy, hanging out day that it was – plus it’s a representative ‘Matt Hobbs’ photo. I’ll let you know if it gets chosen. Fingers crossed..
flickr-oo!
Yesterday flickr changed their policies on ‘old skool’ users, that is to say the folks who signed up for the site prior to the Yahoo! takeover and requirement that you use Yahoo IDs. They also decided to place limits on the number of tags and contacts you can use – ostensibly for performance reasons. Turns out people are mighty pissed at this, and in fact I probably would be were it not that I already have a Yahoo ID from years back.
Of course the guy who is mighty pissed happens to be CEO of Zooomr.. an easily mistyped Flickr rip off that, every time I’ve visited it, is slow, badly designed and generally seems to be nowhere near as good as flickr even with these limitations. So I’m sure he’s happy and will pick up a few of the dissenters, the question is – how many old skool users, many of whom are big influencers in the online photo world, will leave now and how many accounts in general will become dormant. Time will tell.
On a related note though, I’ve been at the Always On conference the last few days – and in an interesting panel on ‘contagious web sites’ this morning discussion was made about how users are always pissed off when changes come out and, yes, you will lose a few – but the question becomes how many leave. I suspect the answer is not so many.
Coffee ‘n Cream
Here are some beautiful high speed shutter images of drops of milk falling into coffee – of which this one is particularly disturbing. I’ll never think about cream the same way again.. Thanks metafilter!
New York Love: IdiotARod 2007
Today was the IdiotARod. A rag tag fugitive fleet of… oh wait. That’s Battlestar Galactica. Sorry. It’s basically just a group of folks who get a shopping cart (that’s trolley to us Brits), dress up funny and then ‘race’ to the finish in a treasure hunt of location finding.
IdiotARod is one of the reasons I love New York: people come together in ‘spontaneous’ gatherings such as this just for the hell of it. They brave possible police action, just to remind us all we’re here, we’re alive and we should cherish the fun and freedoms we have. Especially at a time when so many freedoms are being carefully eroded in the name of ‘safety’.
Next year come along. Or check out Chenguin. Or dress as a zombie. Or santa. Or start your own. I’ll be there.
BTW: In a fit of uncharacteristic timeliness I’ve uploaded all of my IdiotARod photos from today. Go check them out here.