I originally wasn't going to bring my SLR along at all on my trip, mainly because it would take up a pile of room. As the departure day loomed in front of me though, I just couldn't bring myself to travel the world with only my point and shoot. As a compromise I decided to bring along the Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 lens, which I bought right before coming. On a 1.6x crop factor it acts more like a 44mm lens, which is close to a standard lens but slightly wider. I was hoping that would be a useful field of view for most situations. I find it a little long for walking around the city, but it's decent enough ...

I realized last night that I'm sort of envious of the people who only post their best photos to their Flickr stream for the purpose of showcasing work or soliciting opinions on techniques. Given that my current Flickr account is pretty jam packed of personal photos, I thought I would start a second account for mainly my high-quality photos or photos that I've taken time to process and enhance. If you're interested in following along, the new account is here. Feel free to add me as a contact and I'll add you back. I'm going to challenge myself to try and do a setup shot each week to try and improve ...

I've been a pro member of Flickr for years now, and it's one of the few services where dropping $30 a year is a no brainer for me. Unfortunately, they seem to have done something to the service the other day that makes it more difficult for me to use in general now. Specifically, I used to be able to option click on a photo and copy the image URL so I could use it in a blog posting. Now on the individual photo pages, an option click seems to automatically put you in notes editing mode. Anyways, not sure what they did, but I really hope they undo it. It makes my blogging workflow a bit more laborious ...

I accidentally stumbled across the official Whitehouse Flickr account tonight, and was pretty enthralled by some of the photos in the account. First thing that's cool is that the Whitehouse even has a Flickr account. Second thing to take note of is that the photos are licensed with a creative commons attribution license, so basically you're free to use them in both commercial and non-commercial settings as long as you do proper attribution. I've always liked looking at candid photos from other presidencies. For whatever reason, I took a fascination with those from Kennedy's administration, probably ...

My friend Jason sent me a link to this video this morning, and I thought it was pretty cool. I contacted the guy who made it, and he gave me permission to show it here. It's a time lapse out a window during an airplane trip. Video by James Leng, All Rights Reserved. ...

Here's a shot I took of around Chilliwack, BC, Canada on my way back from a family visit. ...

I did something similar in Feburary of this year for Northern Voice, and I thought it would be a good idea to try again. Given that Barack Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to embrace social media, I thought I'd do a celebratory mosaic using a public photos posted to Flickr. The image is constructed using Flickr photos from everyday, normal people, the same people who helped Obama and his grass-roots campaign to secure the presidency. The search tags used on Flickr were "obama election victory" and "obama celebration". The result is a mosiac using 1600 images. Enjoy. ...

For those of you who follow my Flickr and my blog, you'll remember a few weeks ago I encountered some of my photos being used commercially on the Internet without my permission. For a while there it looked like the only recourse was going to be through legal channels, but after meeting with everyone today at a coffee shop, I'm happy to say we've all agreed on an arrangement that should work out. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure rights of photographers are respected, and even went so far to do a podcast with the guys at Creative Commons last year. So I'm obviously glad that this issue ...

Yes sports fans, it's that time again -- we've been messing around with yet another plugin over at BraveNewCode. But first, everyone should know that we just put the finishing touches on WPtouch 2.0 today. There are still a few small bugs to squish, but hopefully it'll hit the market sometime in the next week or two. It's pretty sexy, if I do so say so myself. In terms of the new plugin, I'll give everyone a little context. In the last two months I've had several people infringe upon my Flickr photo licenses by using my photos commercially. One of those incidences ended peacefully, but unfortunately ...

I was talking to Rebecca tonight about how easy it is to forget all the things in life that are important. Too often people focus on the negative things, and forget all the people and things in their lives that make them happy on a regular basis. So tonight I walked around my apartment taking photos of things that make me happy at home. I added them all to a Flickr set called Things That Make Me Happy. It's a work in progress, and I'm adding a few old shots as well, including this one of me and some friends that snuck under the radar. I had a ton of fun doing this, so I'm hoping I can encourage ...

This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you'd like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form near the middle. You can also follow the blogathon RSS feed for this site by clicking here. ...

As most of you know, I really enjoy photography. I have been fortunate enough to have received a bit of recognition for some of the shots I've done, and even managed to attend the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards as a photographer. I thought I'd post a few of my favourite shots here for those that are new here. Most of these shots make use of a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography. This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you'd like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form near ...

I read this article this morning, and as a photographer, found it rather surprising. A few weeks ago CityTV used some guy's photos off of Flickr and used them in an on-air broadcast. The person who took them did talk to someone from CityTV, but did not give them permission to use the photos. Nonetheless, they aired the photos without any sort of attribution. Obviously the person who took them was upset, and appealed to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) about it. After nine months, the CBSC finally ruled that CityTV should be forced to apologize on air: As a result, City must issue ...

I accidentally stumbled onto my own feed in Google reader today and noticed some photos I actually didn't take. For whatever reasons, it seems like feed burner is not filtering the content based on my user account at Flickr, but instead is including public photos tagged "feedburner", something it never used to do. I checked my settings, and it's definitely setup to only include photos from my stream, so the problem seems to be on their end. I tried finding a contact email on their site, but all they do is push you to the support forums (I hate this practice by companies nowadays -- support ...

I received an email a while ago from an editor at Wikipedia, asking me if I would mind if they using one of my juno photos on a page. The only catch is that they wanted me to change the license of the photo to allow for commercial use and derivative works. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia -- I use it all the time. So I really wanted to help those guys out and let them use my photo. Since I paid for the entire Juno trip myself, I have a hard time actively letting other people make money from my work. As a compromise, I offered to grant Wikipedia a non-revokable license for use of that photo on their ...

So I felt like flexing my brain a bit tonight. Everyone has been going rather stir crazy over Flickr video, so tonight I uploaded a few and played around. Two things I really like: The quality is really good They let you use whatever aspect ratio you want Those are two big wins in my eyes. Anyways, I reverse engineered their RSS feed a bit, and modified the Crossroads plugin to handle video. The end result is now on my website, and you can play with it my clicking on the videos listed in the sidebar. Have fun! ...

Last night while lying in bed I had the crazy idea to try and make a mosaic out of all the photos from Northern Voice. Tonight, while sitting in front of the TV, I decided to make an attempt at it. So, here is the end result. It's 40 tiles wide by 40 tiles tall, for a total of 1600 individual images. If you want to see it large, click on the image to download a huge version (approximate 9MB). ...

So here's some food for thought for the blogosphere. Lately I've been pondering a few of the legal aspects of the Internet, namely what it is we are all allowed to do, and what it is some companies think we shouldn't be allowed to. Let me give you a use-case to demonstrate what I'm talking about. Photo by Ben Sheldon on Flickr Let's say I set up a blog, and I'm checking out Flickr and I see a photo I like. Let's say for a second that the CC license is set in such a way that I can use the photo on my blog. So, I right click on the image, say "copy image address", and slap it into a blog ...

Ok, seriously. The things I would do if I had a few million bucks. I'm amazed to no end how many things about the internet kind of suck. Things that you'd think would be easy to fix, but for whatever reason nobody gets around to fixing them. First company that I need to bash is YouTube. Seriously, Google buys you for 1.6 BILLION dollars and what's the first thing you do? Stick your head in the sand. How come there aren't any cool features, or you know, like standard features coming your way. Why do you always screw up the audio/video sync on EVERY video I upload? Another prime example -- they ...

In about 30 minutes, the beach photowalk near my place is going to begin. It turned out to be a rather nice day with some ideal light, so hopefully there will be a pile of great shots taken. The challenge always for me is figuring out what lens to bring and what exactly I want to shoot. I haven't shot film in quite a while, so I loaded some 160VC portrait film in my one camera and put my wide angle on it, and will bring my 70-200mm f/2.8L for doing some portraits near the water. I'm just making some coffee and making sure my cameras are good to go, then heading downstairs to meet people. I'll ...