Tag: flickr Posts

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 for doing portraits (although I haven’t done any yet). I probably should have brought along a zoom, but I’ve made do with the prime so far. Anyways, here are a […]

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 some of my techniques. Also, it may help with the occasional boredom that occurs from time to time.

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 (right now I’m using Safari inspector to grab the URL of the photo I want — I suspect there’s another way, but I couldn’t find it).

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 because there were a lot of family moments with him, and moments between him and his brother. Here are a few shots from the Whitehouse stream that I think are particularly awesome: And my personal favourite, a shot of Obama looking at a portrait of Kennedy: All photos from The Official Whitehouse Photostream.

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. If you’d like to see a higher resolution version, head on over here.

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 was resolved peacefully and everyone walked away happy. I’m more than content to put this issue behind me and move on.

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 the other one is still ongoing. While not for certain, I suspect the odd person grabs photos from my blog (after doing a Google image search), not really knowing that photos on my blog have CC licenses associated with them. So to battle […]

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 others to as well. So, if you have Flickr, go ahead and join this group. Then, go through your Flickr set and add ten photos that represent things in your life […]