In Photos dot org

Late Autumn Leaves

The browns and yellows of Autumn grow darker as the rain soaks in and leaves disintegrate on the ground. A bench stands tall in the distance at Doneraile Park, Co. Cork.

Girl and the bear

A young girl greets a bear on Patrick’s Street, Cork.

Shopping is in full swing but it’s the small things like the smile of a child that bring light to the world.

One of the things stopping me hugging and embracing Zooomr is how slow it is for me to view images off their servers. Take for example the image on this post on Thomas Hawk’s blog. There are two things wrong with it:

1. It’s 241k, but it downloads on my fast shiny broadband connection like it’s ten times bigger. Brings me back to the good old days of dialup and a modem connection. Remember how that was? Oh, there’s the connection made, first bit of the image, oh oh, a small bit more, half way there, yawn, zzzzzz. I’ve fallen asleep.
2. It’s not cachable. Every time you reload that page the whole image has to download again. Go check out what the cacheability engine thinks.
   

   *
   http://static.zooomr.com/images/265853_8ec115b6db.jpg
   Date Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:22:30 GMT
   Expires -
   Cache-Control -
   Last-Modified -
   ETag -
   Content-Length 241.9K (247754)
   Server lighttpd/1.4.13

   This object will be considered stale, because it doesn’t have any freshness information assigned. It doesn’t have a validator present.

   Compare that with the image from my previous post:

   *
   http://static.flickr.com/131/322052492_c728e66f9e_o.jpg
   Date Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:24:50 GMT
   Expires -
   Cache-Control -
   Last-Modified 2 min 28 sec ago (Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:22:22 GMT) validated
   ETag -
   Content-Length 127.2K (130220)
   Server Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

   This object doesn’t have any explicit freshness information set, so a cache may use Last-Modified to determine how fresh it is with an adaptive TTL (at this time, it could be, depending on the adaptive percent used, considered fresh for: 29 sec (20%), 1 min 14 sec (50%), 2 min 28 sec (100%)). It can be validated with Last-Modified. The clock on this Web server appears to be set incorrectly; this can cause problems when calculating freshness.

   Despite the problems reported above the image is cached by my browser and even with a force reload, it loads quicky.

I’m not sure how to fix the first problem except by adding a faster pipe to the servers hosting the data or upgrading the hosting hardware, but the second problem is very easy to fix using eTags and better headers. There are numerous tutorials and even code examples out there. Please, please, please look into it and make your images more cacheable! Your European neighbours will really appreciate it!

I look good!

A street performer from Cork Circus, a street theatre company, poses for a photo on Patrick’s Street, Cork.

That reminds me, I must email him the URL of this blog as he was interested in photos!

Shopping Expressions

Worried looks accompany the average male during the Christmas shopping season. While this was taken at the end of October I bet that young man is still walking around with the same harried look.

My quest for a graphics tablet is complete. The Wacom Graphire4 arrived yesterday from Pixmania. As I promised to myself, I haven’t opened it yet and won’t do so until Christmas Day, or after because the 25th is going to be so busy!

Oh those lines!

Pedestrians gather at the traffic lights on Grand Parade and wait to cross a busy city-center street. Yes I got a few funny looks as I crouched down with my camera but I’m used to it by now!

This was a construction site a few months ago but work is progressing well and most of the work is done.

This was an entry in the MCC Patterns around us competition a few weeks back.

The city shoot last night with the club was a great success. I didn’t have a tripod with me and in the dark that posed a challenge sometimes but at other times it was a blessing. There’s enough street furniture to rest a camera on if needed.

• The blog will have two displays: compact and full.
• Compact format: on the front page of the blog it shall display one primary photo on the left hand side of the browser with description, permalink and a comments link. On the right shall be a dozen thumbnails from previous posts. Above and below the image will be “Next” and “Previous” links to newer and older posts. These links must point at permalinks, not /page/X/ urls.
• Clicking on a thumbnail will refresh the left hand side of the browser, displaying the new image, description, permalink and comments.
• As I like to write about photography I want to display the last post from my Words category under the main image of the front page of the site.
• Articles in the Words category will be displayed one by one like the default “compact” format of the blog.
• When a user clicks on the permalink of a photo the display will look the same as the front page but it will not have the newest post from the Words category.
• Full format: Clicking on a “Show all” button above the thumbnails will load a new stylesheet that will make the page appear in a more traditional blog format with multiple posts per page and the newest at the top. Much like this page. Next and Prev links have to morph to /page/X/ links.
• Search engines and non-css aware clients will see a “normal” blog with multiple posts per page.
• Browsing a tag or category archive will follow the same compact/full format as above.
• Need space for advertising as well. Top and sidebar.

Colin Finch is working on a photoblog theme with thumbnails in the sidebar. He’s using the “optional excerpt” feature of WordPress to handle the thumbnails. Unfortunately he’s battling with Internet Explorer because it’s not behaving. Can someone lend him a hand?

Yes I want a photoblog, and a regular blog, with a cherry on top please.

Port of Cork

The Port of Cork seen from the hills on the north side of the city. Looks carefully and you can see several landmarks:

• The Elysian building site
• R&H Hall
• Cork Bonded Warehouses
• Holy Trinity Church

And many more sights!

I entered Little Communion Girl into the Photo Friday “Fresh” competition this morning. Let’s have a look at the other entrants.

The Stars and Stripes on Alcatraz

The flag of the United States flies over Alcatraz Island on a windy August day.

This was originally a portrait shot but I squared it off to emphasize the vertical and horizontal leading lines. The hydrant is much more prominent in the foreground too. The red rusty texture beloved of all photographers sets off the clean lines of the red stripes in the flag.

I took a photo of an even older flag several months ago. It belongs to my uncle and has only 46 stars!

Up up and away

Yesterday the Elysian’s tower reached the 18th floor, 72m above sea level and one of the tallest buildings in the country. Apparently St Finbarre’s Cathedral is 75m to it’s central spire but there won’t be a 2400sq ft penthouse at the top of that!

While we Irish congratulate ourselves on building an 18 storey lift shaft, here’s one I made earlier in San Francisco. I tried counting the floors but lost count around 14!