Doc snapped this aerial photo from his window seat. It depicts “farms with center-fed irrigation, in the San Luis Valley of Colorado”. It immediately reminded me of a childhood game, Connect Four:
UPDATE: Thinking about this, did anybody else notice that they’re wasting a bunch of space for each circle-in-a-square? Roughly 22%, if I’m not incorrect. Mind you, water is surely a scarcer resource than land, so I’m sure the circles are a wiser approach. And maybe they grow some low-water crop in the extra 22%?
On Twitter, Marshalljust pointed toTag Galaxy, a super-slick and fun new way to browse Flickr photos by tag. You enter a tag and it renders that tag as a sun, with a bunch of related tags orbiting it:
Add a new tag and it drills down into all of the photos and related tags that share those two tags. Finally, when you’re sufficiently happy with the filtering, click on the sun itself and it lays all of the photos on the surface of the sun…planet…er…heavenly body:
You can then manipulate the sphere, spinning it to browse using the scroll wheel to zoom. I’m not sure how practically useful it is, but it’s sure fun to play with. It’s kind of graphically-intensive, and brought my old Windows PC to a crawl. It was quite speedy, however, on my MacBook.
On a related note, Waxy just linked to WolfenFlickr 3D, which uses Castle Woflensteing 3-D, an old-school first-person shooter, as a Flickr browser.
On a related note, does anybody know why Flickr decided that this photo was taken in ‘Harris Green, Victoria’ (see the ‘Additional Information’ metadata to the right of the photo)?
Monique is a keynote speaker down at Portus 2008, a Harry Potter convention down in Dallas. I’ve been enjoying her photos, which provide yet another view into the dorky but lovable world of intense fandom. Here are two favourites. I love that He Who Must Not Ever, Ever Be Named is on a call:
We were briefly in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t get much of a chance for sightseeing, though we did take an enjoyable architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. That’s where we took these fifteen odd photos. They’re unremarkable. This is probably the best one:
I’ve been reading, er, viewing Sam Javanrouh’s terrific photoblog forever. This might be the first video he’s posted. At least, it’s the first video I remember. The caption reads “Chess players at Dundas Square, Toronto. Shot on Canon 5D with 5 seconds intervals. Exposure of 1 second for each frame. Music from Philip Glass’s ‘The Photographer’”.
We’re back in Essaouira after, all told, about 1000 km of driving in and out of the desert. I’m catching up on email and such, but I wanted to post to say that we’d survived, and to point to our 88 photos from the trip (here’s a slideshow, if you prefer).
In honour of my Aunt Lynn, who only ever wants to see one’s best three vacation photos, here’s five. Click for larger versions:
Photographically speaking, this trip kicked my ass. Looking at the photos, I recognize how much more care I need to take, how much more practice I need, and how I could really use some instruction on technique. When we get back to Victoria, I’m going to look around for a good 200-level photography course.
I don’t often participate in Flickr memes, but it’s Saturday and this one was too fun to pass up. Via Neatorama, you compose faux CD covers for imaginary bands using these three sources:
There doesn’t seem to be much respect for copyright in step #3 there. I regenerated the Explore page until I got an image that was Creative Commons-licensed. It didn’t take long.
Here are my submissions. They’re not nearly as good as most of the others in the photo pool, but they were fun to make none the less.
What’s funny is that most people who are deciding on what to buy think the priorities are exactly the opposite. They think that by getting the most megapixels or by buying the camera that the pros use, they’ll get great pictures. Don’t believe this. The camera companies are just trying to brainwash you into buying more camera than you need, and you’ll end up puzzled as to why your photographs end up looking, well, mediocre.
Dave recommends acquiring a card reader and not using the USB interface on your camera–he says that it’s slow and wastes your camera’s battery life. I noticed that professional photographer Kris Krug also uses a card reader. I’m not serious enough to bother, I guess. Plus, do I really need another peripheral kicking around my desk?
