Photography – Page 281 – In Photos dot Org

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.

Easy self portraits with the Quik Pod

This is interesting. One of the benefits of a really wide angle lens is that taking self portraits with my wife Jacinta is rather easy. One of the down sides of having the camera at arm’s length is the distortion of the lens isn’t the most flattering thing in the world.

Into the fray comes the Quik Pod. It’s an extendable pole you can put your camera on! I don’t imagine I could put my Canon 20D, Sigma 10-20 lens and perhaps the Canon 580EX on the end and lift the weight of it without capturing a cringing and straining face in any resulting image but if someone wants to send me one to try out I’d be more than happy to do a full review of it for you! (via Exposure)

11 SEO tips for your photoblog

Richard Hearne offered some great tips for making Irish photoblog mcawilliams.com more visible on the search engines and they’re very good general search engine optimization tips that can be applied to any website.

He has grouped his tips into the following categories:

Site Architecture
On-Page Optimisation
Off-site Optimisation

Richard’s post is well worth reading, even if you don’t have a photoblog. I know I learned a thing or two that are already paying off!

I have a few more tips to add to those above. Most of them are geared towards the photo blog community rather than general blogging sites, but read on even if you’re not running a photoblog!

Join Photoblogs.org before you do anything else. It’s the center of the photoblog universe and it’s worth participating in the community there.
Join VFXY and Cool photoblogs. VFXY displays thumbnails of their member’s blogs which is great for driving traffic. Coolphotoblogs is a photoblog directory. I’m a member of the former, but something went wrong with my application to the latter and I haven’t bothered figuring it out yet.
Join Flickr, Zooomr, 23HQ and any other social photo sharing site you care to mention. Zooomr are offering premium accounts to bloggers still I think. You can host your photo there, saving your bandwidth costs. It’s also a very good way of exposing your photography to a wider audience. Thanks to Flickr I’ve almost made back the cost of hosting this website through sales of my photos.
Taking a leaf from Richard above, if you host your images on Flickr, they require a link back to that picture’s page on flickr.com. Make sure you don’t leak page rank by adding rel=’external nofollow’ to that link. The same applies to Zooomr and 23HQ of course.
Visit the Photoblogs.org wiki, especially the tips and tricks page and how to get traffic to your photoblog.
Write. Search engines can’t do much with an image, but if you describe the image in a small paragraph of text that will help. In a similar vein, every photo should have a title. It might be tempting to number the image, or call them “Untitled #98”, “Untitled #99”, “Untitled #100” and so on, but that won’t help people find your website.
As you’re now writing, link. Link to other sites and blogs and do it often. Photoblogs don’t link enough. Where’s the conversation? Everybody has their heads stuck in the sand doing their own thing, afraid that they’ll lose visitors for good if they leave their site. Link to specific blog posts and those posts will be sent a “ping” or a “trackback”. That tells that blog’s owner you’ve been talking about his work. It also plants a link to your blog right in his comments section where his visitors can find it and follow what you said about his work. Here’s a ping my blog sent to an older post on my site. My feed reader post has lots of external links. Oh look, there’ll be a ping from that link too! Links really are the lifeblood of your blog.
I may be biased, but I recommend you use WordPress to host your photoblog. It has support for pinging and trackbacks out of the box, a facility some other photoblog software don’t have. If you don’t want to host a WordPress blog yourself, open a blog on WordPress.com and check out what people are posting about photography, photos and even flickr. It’s a bit more limited than a regular WordPress blog but you’ll get a good feel for it. Best of all, you can export your blog and host it yourself when you feel up to it!
If you do use WordPress, install Ultimate Tag Warrior so your posts are categorised in a fine grained manner. Tags do wonderful things for search engines, and this is a must have for any WordPress blog. Note that tagging support is going into WordPress right now, but it’s still being developed. I think a small script to convert UTW tags to WordPress tags is called for. Hopefully I’ll have it running here within the next few days.
Join Google webmaster tools and enable “Enhanced Image Search”. Read more about it here but I’ve noticed an increase in hits from Google Image Search since I opted in to it.
Claim your blog on Technorati. Here’s the Technorati page for this blog. Add an icon to your user account to encourage clicks on your stories there.

With a few changes to your photoblog you can drastically increase the traffic to your site and share your work with a wider audience. You never know, one of your photos could become a viral email attachment sent around to thousands of people in offices and homes.

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