In Photos dot Org

The most sent around duck photo
I would love to know who made an email attachment of my thieving duck and thank them. The Aflac Duck seems to be a well known part of American insurance marketing and people got a kick out of these ducks stealing money from a lady on the street!

Apparently my thieving duck has become “the most sent-around-ha-ha-look-at-the-duck photo evar” but I wish I had watermarked the image with my blog url. It has appeared on:
To those that linked back here, thank you. To the rest, shame on you, why didn’t you use Google and find my blog?

I’m still chuffed that an image of mine is now an “urban legand” of sorts. Not many can say that! More comments on flickr but please link here if you’re going to link anywhere!

Update – welcome visitors from the Zefrank forum!

Update on June 14th. It appears the News of the World newspaper used the Thieving Duck last Sunday. I sent them off an email this afternoon so hopefully I will hear from them within a day or two.

Aperture ƒ/6.3

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 55mm

ISO 100

Shutter speed 1/80s
April 1, 2007
Alcatraz Control Center

Alcatraz Control Center

The Control Center in Alcatraz. This room is visible to all visitors to the prison and is beautifully preserved.

I couldn’t find anything specific about this room but Alcatraz History has a very good site with lots of information about the prison on Alcatraz Island.

Aperture ƒ/4

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 10mm

ISO 200

Shutter speed 1/2.5s

April 1, 2007
Clearing out my feed reader
My feed addiction has got to stop! It’s a great way to keep up to date on my favourite blogs but when it gets to over 300 blogs then something has to be done. That means cutting back on my subscriptions. Unfortunately the first to go will be those photoblogs that don’t offer a full feed, or only show thumbnails. If I had time, I’d visit your blog every day but I don’t, and it’s impossible to judge the merits of a photo from a tiny thumbprint of an image.

Without further ado, here’s the list of blogs I have dropped from my feed reader. If you’ve come here because you saw traffic to your blog through a link in this post, please consider a full feed. I’d be back like a shot because I enjoyed your photography enough to subscribe in the first place!
- panhandlin’
- Deceptive Media
- North Atlantic Skyline
- Life Vicarious
- Alakija.com
- Shorpy (which I featured only a few days ago!)
- in-Public
- Stockphototalk – photography news site
- Water Molotov – love his street photography, sigh.
- Never Happen
- Chromasia
- image ANAlogy
- MUTE
- XoverIP
- Every so often
- 10xzoom.ro
- a b s o l u t e l y n o t h i n g almost got the chop but it’s thumbnails are just big enough to make out.
- Gingerpixel stays too, but please Claire, full feed?
- No Traces – wonderful photos but not even a thumbnail in the feed.
- Images of my thoughts – ugly watermarks.
- Mystery Me
- Eterisk
- Pasci it
- Annaweb
- caps:photo
- Low Exposure
- ~~Twenty4~~ – Twenty4 now uses Pixelpost and has a full feed! Find it at http://twenty4.net/pp/. Thank you Grit! The pictures of your niece are delightful!
Your feed readers are the most loyal of your readers and they should be treated accordingly. Give them something to get their teeth into instead of a small morsel and you’ll find that traffic to your blog increases, you’ll get more links to your posts and maybe even more comments by an appreciative audience.

Here are the photography related blogs that stay.
- Chromalark
- Flak Photo
- About Photography – a partial feed but worth haning on to.
- Thomas Hawk
- Photo Business News & Forum
- intermittent shots
- The Candid Frame
- The Online Photographer
- Strobist – started out great but I find myself not visiting as much. Partial feed unfortunately. Almost chopped.
- Renaissance Man
- The Digital Story – although I wonder why I still subscribe. I rarely listen to podcasts.
- The Photography Blog – started out well, but it’s now mostly “yet another list of camera reviews” site.
- The Death Boogie Diaries – some NSFW stuff.
- Svenfoo – GIMP developer.
- Open Source Photography (OSP)
- GIMP Users on Flickr.
- McAWilliams Photo blog
- Photojournalism – Partial feed, but Mark’s a brilliant photographer and writer.
- Photogranny
- A tiny blip in the continuum
- Digital Photography World – partial feed but I like his writing.
- Digital Light and Shadow
- ajaxnetphoto
- Daily dose of imagery
- A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania
- Therefore, I_blog
- Digital Camera Reviews
- Donal
- Phil’s Photos
- Headphoneland
- Alkos
- Round Here
- Capture Capture
- Photostream
- Rymus
- Red Mum
And a lot more but I got tired of copy/pasting everything.

Coming up on Monday: search engine tips for your photoblog. Don’t miss it!
March 31, 2007
A view on an Alcatraz Street

A view on an Alcatraz Street

Looking through a doorway onto one of the streets of Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco. Tourists congregate while listening to the electronic tour guide.

I think I should have all my photos of Alcatraz and San Francisco posted before my next trip there in July.

Aperture ƒ/4

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 10mm

ISO 200

Shutter speed 1/30s

March 31, 2007
Get GIMPed Now!

Joy of Tech makes a good point about the pricing of Adobe products. If you can’t afford to buy a copy of Photoshop then give the GIMP a go. It’d free, it’s what I use to process all my photos and it has many of the features most people need. (via)

March 30, 2007
Silhouettes in the club

Silhouettes in the club

Some of the audience who gathered to take part in the Stanley Super 800 video of Gatecrashing silhouetted against the bright lights around the band’s equipment.

I underexposed on purpose so the silhouettes of the people in the image contrasted with the stage lighting. Shot during a break in performances when most people were outside getting some air!

Aperture ƒ/4.5

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 28mm

ISO 200

Shutter speed 1/6s

March 30, 2007
Gatecrashing on Caroline Street

Gatecrashing on Caroline Street

Another shot from Sunday at Stanley Super 800’s recording of the Gatecrashing video. The multi-shot posts are such a pain to do the rest of these will be single photo posts!

Aperture ƒ/5

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 18mm

ISO 200

Shutter speed 1/60s

March 29, 2007
Three Gatecrashing Guys

Three Gatecrashing Guys

Three members of the audience at Stanley Super 800’s recording of the music video, Gatecrashing at Caroline St. Cork on Sunday.

Aperture ƒ/5

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 15mm

ISO 100

Shutter speed 1/60s

March 28, 2007
Poster size prints only 9.99

Turkish Trabordine only 19.99! Where’s that Muunkaay!

No, Daft Dave hasn’t invaded the blogosphere yet, but until the 31st of March Photobox.ie are offering poster size prints for only €9.99 which seems like quite a good deal. I’m ordering a few prints off them to see what the quality is like but I’ve ordered before and been happy with the results so hopefully they won’t disappoint.

Give tired rooms a stunning makeover by creating a feature wall with poster prints. Why not try using interesting crops to create a series of prints – as A3, 16″x12″, 18″x12″, 20″x16″ A2 and 30″x20″ size prints are just €9.99 each! Just enter offer code CREATEWALLARTIE at the checkout. The only limit is your creativity!

March 27, 2007
Stanley Super 800 Gatecrashing Again

Stanley Super 800 Gatecrashing Again

Stanley Super 800 playing in the old Tramway power station in Caroline St. Cork on Sunday.

More photos here!

Aperture ƒ/4

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 10mm

ISO 800

Shutter speed 1/30s

March 27, 2007
Stanley Super 800 Gatecrashing

Where does the weekend go? Last weekend was "getting the baby stuff together" weekend, but it was also buy another UPS time too as Blarney was hit by another couple of power cuts. It was also Ken‘s stag and I was simply too tired to go out on Saturday night so I missed all the fun in the Indian Palace and the pub afterwards. Sorry about that!
Sunday morning was more of the same – work some photos for the blog, build a chest of drawers. Who knew preparing for a baby would be so much work?

Anyway, come 4pm Sunday afternoon I was in the old tram power station on Caroline Street to watch Cork band Stanley Super 800 record their new video "Gatecrashing". Over the next few days I’ll post a few photos from the 2 hour session.

Stanley Super 800 Gatecrashing

The video was filmed in front of an audience dancing and shouting and having a great time. Although they look relaxed in this shot don’t be fooled. They’re a bunch of mad folk who gave it their all and had a great time to boot!

Sorry for the poor quality of the photo. The room was full of artificial smoke and the autofocus was fooled by it. Liberal use of unsharp mask helped and I am so glad I brought my wide angle lens!

Truely they were the stars of the show!

Aperture ƒ/4

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 10mm

ISO 200

Shutter speed 1/30s

March 26, 2007
City people in a b/w world

City people in a b/w world

Shopping, talking, walking and rushing. People in the concrete jungle.

Selective colourisation using a layer mask to hide a b/w layer above the original colour layer. Shot from the same place I took this photo in front of The Body Shop in Cork.

Aperture ƒ/8

Camera Canon EOS 20D

Focal length 10mm

ISO 200

Shutter speed 1/200s

March 25, 2007

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