by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 17, 2005 | Front Page, Photography
Or not, well perhaps a tiny little bit of fame. Recently two of my images were chosen to be used on other websites.
One is a UK based support site for the national schools network, they used my image of a Lancaster Bomber dropping 1 million poppies on a blog entry about the VE and VJ day celebrations in London.
The other is by The Digital Photography Weblog who chose my image of some deck chairs as their Digital Photo of the Day for 17th August 2005
Both were very kind to let me know they were using my image and gave due credit, exactly as required by the Creative Commons license I put my content under.
I have had a number of cases in the past where my images were just blatantly stolen and people claiming they took them, or worse even direct linking to them on my server. A bit of mod_rewrite magic replacing those images for visitors to their sites usually do the trick nicely for getting them removed, but I do wish I don’t have to resort to this kind of thing. Kudos to the above sites for doing things right.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 21, 2005 | Photography
I uploaded my first picks to Flickr on the 14th of June so thats just over a month ago.
I obviously was pretty much sold on it back then already since I uploaded 700 photos in the following few days, but now I am realizing other things about Flickr that was not apparent during my poking around on it leading up to the uploading of photos.
Mostly the things I’m realizing are about the community on flickr, people really do contribute, comment, make suggestions, post to the forums etc in a very friendly and accommodating way. In short it’s one of the best photo communities I’ve taken part in.
Some stats on my photos hosted there:
| Number of Views: |
10380 |
| Photos with comments: |
Difficult to say, > 100 |
| Photos that’s been marked as Favorites: |
73 |
| Photos with > 100 views: |
6 |
| Number of Contacts: |
71 |
| People who list me as Contact: |
59 |
There are some other interesting stats but I think this paints the picture, when I had my photos on a Gallery hosted on my own machine I got loads of hits as well but nothing like on Flickr and those hits were mostly driven from Google and very much a hit-and-run type scenario. No-one left comments or anything, I never had any kind of interaction with those viewers, it’s very different on Flickr and that’s the major selling point.
Flickr has the concept of contacts, you add them, they get a mail that you’ve done so and they can see your photos and choose to add you as a contact too. There is a special page that shows a stream of photos uploaded by your contacts and also an RSS feed. This is great for keeping track of peoples work instead of just following a blog since people tend to upload only their best to a photoblog.
Photos can also belong to groups, there are groups for anything you can imagine, so I tend to send photos to groups like People in Black and White, these groups also have discussion forums.
So to sum up, I’m very happy with the $24.95 I spent to get me on Flickr for a year, it’s been great and it’s changed drastically how I work with my photos, even in strange ways like making it easier to publish to my photoblog which means I do it more often. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for casual photo hosting for family and friends and for anyone interested in a community driven site.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 1, 2005 | Photography
I made some changes to the workflow for getting photos onto my photoblog. Previously I mentioned using a bit of Perl trickery to get photos posted to my photoblog in a semi automated manner.
I’ve now made this much better since I got my Flickr account. Since all my photos that I’ve edited will end up on Flickr it also means that all photos I post to the blog will be on Flickr.
I wrote something using the Flickr API in Perl to fetch a given image from flickr, get the meta data from it, get the thumbnails that Flickr makes – nice uniformly square ones – and combine all of this into a blog posting. The advantage here is that I can use the very good Flickr UI to edit descriptions and the like relying on the Perl code to just fetch those and publish it to the blog without needing me to duplicate any data entry.
There exists a Flickr::API module for Perl to make this easy but it uses XML::Parser::Lite::Tree to give the data back to the user and I find this quite complex so I am using XML::DOM to parse the XML that Flickr returns and while this is probably more code to write it is much more readable.
The end result is that I’ve changed the layout of posts to be more readable, the shooting data is in a table with some bold’s etc and there is also now a links section that for the moment only points to the Flickr page of the posted photo. I’m also using the square thumbnails from Flickr which saves me time in making my own as well as making my blogs look better since thing’s are always laid out the same with these.
I may post some code samples later, suffice so say the Flickr API is really amazing you can easily skin the whole site into your design.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 17, 2005 | Photography
I’ve finally finished uploading all of my photos that I edited since buying the D70 onto Flickr. I also went through my old gallery site and found all the older ones I had in my Favorites group there, re-edited these and uploaded them too. The grand total is 690 photos.
It was a big job to say the least, it was made even bigger by the fact that for a very long time I used the ‘Save for web’ thing on photoshop, what a bad idea! It strips out Exif information which means it messed up the Calendar View on Flickr.
I previously posted about Image::ExifTool and again it proved to be invaluable to me. It comes with a command line tool for manipulating Exif data which can be used to copy Exif data from one file to another. Thanks to my strict naming conventions I could fetch original Exif information out of the original JPG or NEF file and copy it to the edited files with a very simple for loop:
for i in D*jpg
do
exiftool -TagsFromFile ../../`echo $i|awk '{print toupper($1)}'` $i
done
Ran that in each directory with Exifless JPG files and it got quickly sorted out, very nice!
Flickr provides a number of tools for uploading data to it, what they do not provide is a Unix command line tool but I found one in Flickr::Upload which worked a charm and made uploading and tagging very very easy. Other tools and scripts for Flickr can be found here.
$ flickr_upload –tag london –tag ‘”portobello road”‘ –tag animalsp6290618.jpg
So with this done I’m about to retire my old Gallery – it’s already empty of all photos – so anyone who was subscribed to RSS feeds there will need to change. I’ve created Sets that more or less resemble my old Gallery categories, it seems you cannot make RSS feeds for individual sets, this really is a PITA but you can subscribe to tags, so to see all photos of a specific Tag in a RSS reader you can view my list of Tags and click the ones you want, there are RSS and Atom links in the generated pages for each.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 15, 2005 | Photography
There has been a bit of noise in the press about the His Royal Idiot The Mayor of London putting up signs all over warning parents to be on the lookout for photographers in public places taking pics of their sprog and that these may be Pedophiles.
While it’s fair that photos may be abused I think this will also cause a general witch hunt of photographers in public places, it is for example impossible to take any kind of wide photo of any touristy area in London without getting at least a small amount of kids in the scene, I suspect we’ll be hearing lots of horror stories of innocent photographers being harassed as a result.
Previously I blogged about a flyer made to apply to the US laws regarding photography and mentioned how no such thing exists for the UK, well it does now and can be found here
The guide was written by Linda Macpherson LL.B, Dip.L.P., LL.M, who is a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, with particular experience in Information Technology Law, Intellectual Property Law and Media Law.
Nice one.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 14, 2005 | Photography, Usefull Things
For a while I’ve been wondering what to do with all the photos I take, edit but don’t put on my photoblog. At the moment for example I’ve been posting a series of shots I took in Greenwich Park one day, but at 1 photo a day by the time I’m done there are tons more I need to put somewhere.
So I signed up for a Flickr freebie account to check it out and I almost immediately signed up for a Pro account. It really is so simple to use and organize your photos, especially with the fancy flash app they have for organizing.
The idea is to just upload all the web versions of photos I edit in photoshop, last year it was around 400 for the whole year, this year it’s nearing 300 already. I’ve uploaded all of 2005 photos and some of 2004 to My Flickr account, at the moment things will be arriving in a weird order, new to old, as I catch up with history but soon you should be able to subscribe and get a more real time view on what I take and how often etc.
I especially like the community bits, already some people have commented on my photos, added to their favorite lists etc, that’s really nice as it can be really difficult to build up any kind of community around ones own photos, but since Flickr is so strongly community orientated it’s pretty nice as a photographer.
I am still getting used to the idea of tags instead of categories, but it seems to work ok so far, everything of course outputs RSS or Atom so you can subscribe to a feed of all photos, or just for instance Photos of People.
Links:
My Photo Stream
My Photo Tags
Sets of Photos
Calendar View by Date-Taken
