Photography – Page 206 – In Photos dot Org

Zooomr Mark III launches with some hiccups

After what seems like a long week of false starts and unfortunate hardware melt downs the new Zooomr launched this weekend. I haven’t logged in yet but I’m looking forward to exploring all the new features Kristopher has been working on.

I do have a bone to pick with them. They are still not caching images properly! Run any Zooomr hosted image through the Cacheability Engine to test it and you’ll get a report like the following:

http://static.zooomr.com/images/2403982_586b90d879.jpg
Expires 1 day from now (Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:04:14 GMT)
Cache-Control max-age=86400
Last-Modified 2 hr ago (Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:04:14 GMT) validation returned same object
ETag –
Content-Length 65.4K (66953)
Server lighttpd/1.4.15

It makes no sense for the image to be sent again. Your browser should be allowed to cache the image. Besides the caching issue, the image is still slow to load and it’s only 67k.

Way back in December I asked, Is Zooomr slow for you too? and was heartened when Kristopher Tate said he was working on a fix. Hopefully the fix is part of an as-yet-unreleased part of Mark III. Without it, using Zooomr for image hosting is really not recommended. Please fix the caching. I really want to like Zooomr!

Now, if only Robert would evangelize fixing their image hosting I’d be a happy camper!

Tinfoil hat time! Google recognises you now!

Thanks Mike for pointing me towards this Arstechnica article about the new facial recognition in Google Image Search. If you add &imgtype=face to any image search url it will only show you faces. Try this search for Cork, Ireland and compare it with this facial search for the same terms. Scary eh?

Ordinary image search

Facial image search

PS. That 4th picture on the facial search is mine. This should make finding images a lot more interesting.

PPS. My Thieving Duck has been used on the Consumerist website! That photo seems to be rather well known!

DPS Users use the GIMP too

My favourite post-processing application, the GIMP, featured highly on a recent Digital Photography School survey. Here are the top 5:

Lightroom
Photoshop CS2
Photoshop CS3
GIMP
Picassa

It just goes to show that price isn’t everything because a lot of people must have deep pockets to pay what Adobe charge for their products.

I also feel encouraged to write more GIMP tutorials now!

Bloggable Flickr Slideshow

Here’s a neat way of embedding Flickr’s slideshow feature in your own blog. flickrSLiDR asks you for a set in your Flickr stream and then gives you some html code to paste into your blog post.

He’s cheating a small bit though. He’s using Flickr’s own slideshow application and simply passing the right parameters to it. Take a look at the code at the end of this post to see for yourself!

Here’s a slideshow of my WordCamp 2006 photos. I’m looking forward to the next one in SF in July!

Oops. And just after publishing this post I realise that it’s a bad thing to post a Flash application that loads lots of photos so you have to click into this post to see the slideshows. They won’t show when in archive mode. Phew.

Continue reading “Bloggable Flickr Slideshow”

Irish photographer wounded in Afghanistan

Irish freelance photographer John McHugh has been wounded in a mortar attack while embedded with US troops in Afghanistan.

The Irish Photographers Website reports,

An Irish freelance photographer was recovering in hospital today after being wounded during fighting in Afghanistan. John McHugh had been in the country for the New York Times embedded with US troops in Kunar province in the east of the country. It is understood he was with US forces when they came under mortar fire on Sunday evening. He suffered shrapnel wounds to his body and was airlifted to Baghran air base for treatment. His injuries are not thought to be life-threatening. Several US troops were also injured in the attack.

Check out John’s site for images from his time in Afghanistan. Here’s hoping he’ll make a speedy recovery!

I just press the little doohickey

Cameras get easier to use all the time, even a pig could use them! Pearls Before Swine on May 8th featured this comic strip.

Not quite in the same league as What The Duck for photographers but a very funny comic for everyone else! 🙂

Strolling on the Grand Parade

Strolling on the Grand Parade

If that couple were to walk along the Grand Parade now they’d be in the middle of a busy street but back in August last year it was still a building site.

Wondering what Cork looked like over 20 years ago? Take a look at these photos!

Aperture	ƒ/11
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/320s

Running along Grand Parade

Running along Grand Parade

Just outside the Peace Park on Grand Parade in Cork an exuberant teenager went running towards me and I was lucky enough to grab this shot before they ran past!

Aperture	ƒ/11
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/320s

Paparazzi wait for Flatley at hospital

Paparazzi wait for Flatley at hospital

Film crews and photographers wait outside Cork University Maternity Hospital yesterday for a shot of Michael Flatley. His wife Niamh gave birth to a bouncing baby boy that morning in the hospital. Apparently Flatley gave a 5 figure donation to the hospital. Nurses I spoke to wondered where it went..

OK, maybe the people pictured are TV3, RTE news and a couple of photographers for the local paper but it’s not often one sees them about and in one place. I was busy helping Jacinta and Adam into the car and we weren’t about to stop and hang about. I told the reporters I had no comments to make except that Adam was in great form and that he and his mom were coming home.

I saw Michael Flatley on TV later and he was beaming! 🙂

Aperture	ƒ/4
Camera	DMC-FZ5
Focal length	16.5mm
ISO	80
Shutter speed	1/200s

Popular Photo now blogging

Cool, Popphoto are blogging! They announced it today but there’s already a few posts up including:

When Being Obessive Pays Off
Tip of the Day: Don’t Hold Your Breath – the photo is misleading, but it’s a good tip for holding a camera steady!
Tip of the Day: Sunrise, Sunset.. suggests how you can use the white balance on your camera to get the best out of the morning or evening.

I’m subscribed!

Clever panoramas with CleVR

Photocritic found a neat bit of software for displaying panoramic images in a scrollable window. It should make showing them off in a blog much easier.

The beauty of the CleVR system is that the panorama uses Flash instead of Quicktime. Flash is installed on a lot more machines than Quicktime making this more accessible. Unfortunately I think it requires Flash 9 as it didn’t work in Firefox on my Linux desktop. Can anyone else confirm? According to the comments on the post above, the CleVR software is lot easier to use than Quicktime too.

The CleVR software itself is written in Java and loads using the Java Quickstart system. Not everyone will have it installed but it worked fine on my Macbook.

Instead of stitching a few photos together in CleVR, here’s one I made earlier. Much earlier in fact. I made this panorama of Cork City back in 2004 but I never uploaded a high-res version of it anywhere. Now I have. Enjoy!

I would love if the panorama image files were stored on my own server. If CleVR go out of business, or change their site, or something unforseen happens then my panorama is lost. At least with regular images hosted on Flickr, I can simply move them elsewhere and they’ll display fine. Hopefully they’ll address that in the future. They’re not making their money from hosting so they might as well get rid of that cost base.

I’d also love to be able to change the size of the viewing window. I tried changing the embed code but the Flash applet still only displays a 450px wide image. Please, please, please CleVR?

Tips for photographing your baby

There’s only a few days left to go before the due date so this post by Michelle Jones is timely. She points at this 3 part series on baby photography by Amber Holritz. Here’s part 2 and part 3.

An image of a child can and should serve the following purposes:
1. Appropriate likeness of the child
2. Artistic rendering
3. Historical documentation for future generations

An image of a child would ideally show:
1. Emotional connection
2. Scale
3. Reality

Great posts on the process of getting to know the family, the different shoots, and building a relationship for future business.