Lately, Flickr has been whipping out new features left and right. I particularly like their new “collections” feature for Pro account holders and the ability to mark images as either photos, screenshots, or art/illustration is also nice. With it comes the ability to search by image type as well.
In addition users can now set their comfort levels for what kind of images they want to see.
On Saturday and Sunday we, the human population, had an opportunity to see the moon completed blotted out by Earth’s shadow in one of those rare events known as a Lunar eclipse. Personally I’ve always thought solar eclipses to be the more interesting variety and so I never even bothered looking for the moon over the weekend.
However, thanks to the power of modern computing, here is an animated version of the entire phenomena, for those like myself that want all the reward without any of the effort.
I have to admit, the orange glow that appears on the moon during the middle of the action is kind of cool.
Nick Tosches spends a year in search of the mysterious origins of his Windows desktop image: Autumn and the Plot Against Me. It’s an interesting read for all of us would-be detectives.
The Queen Mary 2, sailed smoothly into the San Francisco Bay on February 4th. It is the largest ship ever to have entered the Bay and it cleared the Golden Gate Bridge with about 30 feet of room.
Having just visited San Francisco last month, the photos and videos make me smile. I wish I would have been there to get some photos of my own.
Attractiveness by Age
Originally uploaded by manitou2121.
Pierre Tourigny downloaded about 30 pictures of women from Hot or Not, a popular internet “photo rating” site, then used SqirlzMorph to create each of the virtual women in the composite images shown here.
“These women do not exist. They are a composite of about 30 faces that I created to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet.”
As anyone that cares to listen knows, I’m a big Flickr fan.
It’s bothered me that Flickr has decided that all the original members need to update the way they login by merging their accounts with Yahoo! accounts.
Here is a copy of the announcement:
Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.
95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It’s easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don’t.You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:
http://flickr.com/account/associate/Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.
Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here:
http://flickr.com/help/signin/Thanks for your patience and understanding – and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you’re reading this, you’ve been around for a while and that means a lot to us!
Warmest regards,– The Flickreenos
Obviously in the end I’m going to stay a Flickr user, but I will admit, I did take this opportunity to shop around, just in case there was something else out there that compares. For a hard core flickr fan like myself, that’s a serious statement.
I know I shouldn’t admit that a change in the way I login to Flickr bothers me, but it does. I really don’t like Yahoo! and so I’ll try not to let my hatred of companies that play dirty get in the way of enjoying the world’s best photo sharing site.
Here is the Official Old Skool Merge Topic on Flickr. The backlash has been fierce. I’ve found reading the comments fuels my disappointment, but also the way the Flickr staff has handled it has me feeling good about the long term future of the site.
Today marks the two year anniversary of the first photo I ever posted to flickr. I’ve since uploaded over 4,300 photos and had almost 71,000 views of my photostream, so of course I still love flickr!
Those of you that know me well, know that I love water sports. Last night my water polo team won the U of L intramurals finals in a victory so decisive, I didn’t actually find out the final score.
I’m not going to say it was easy. For one thing, we were missing a lot of players last night. One had bus trouble and wasn’t back from her swim meet in Vancouver, another had a concert to perform in — one that if he missed he would fail his music class. There were a couple other players that just sort of, stopped coming to the games, so that left us a person short and no subs.
It was 6 on 7 for the first half and we actually did really well, despite being short handed. However, near the beginning of the second half, our goalie swam up out of the water to make a save and then fell back under the water shaking with pain. Nobody could figure out what happened to him. I swam over as did a couple others and it turns out that he had one of the worst cramps in his calf that I’ve ever seen. It was pulsing up and down.
So that left us down to 5 players. I have to be honest — I was a little worried.
It turns out my fear was misplaced because it was at this point that we really started to pull ahead. It’s games like this one that remind me why I love water sports so much.
Update: Check out this great water polo flickr set by my friend John Lapins.
Last month a company called MOO Print Ltd gave out ten free “moo cards” to any Flickr Pro subscriber. Since I didn’t have anything to lose, I ordered up my ten free cards and was pleased that there really are no strings attached and the cards look great.
I was excited to jump on the “take pictures of my moo cards and post them on flickr” bandwagon, however, at the time I got mine in the mail, my camera happened to be inconveniently getting a free massage by the nice people at Nikon. (They replaced the shutter and aperture, not to mention gave it a nice software upgrade—it fixed the problem so despite the wait I’m happy again).
Anyway now that I have my camera back and without further ado, here are a few of my moo cards:
The thing on the left is a roll of magnetic tape. I’m in the process of turning the cards into magnets moo-gnets.
I’m not exactly a professional photographer even though I have a very nice digital SLR camera. However, very often people assume that seeing a person carrying a professional looking camera is seeing a person that takes professional looking photos. This can be good and bad, because while I have been known to get some pretty good captures, I feel a little intimidated that people expect all my photos to be great. (I do my best.)
This last week has been Whoop-Up Days in Lethbridge, which is to say the Rodeo has been on at the Stampede and Exhibition Park and though I’ve lived here for almost 4 years, this was the first time I’ve been to the Lethbridge Rodeo. I took a bunch of photos that even though I know will probably never win any awards, they do give a pleasant taste of what the rodeo is all about.
The rodeo I remember as a kid was not nearly as entertaining as my experience on Friday and Saturday night. I remember sitting through extremely long breaks where it seemed that nothing was happening followed by short bursts of entertainment which if you were not careful, you might miss completely because hey what’s going on UNDERNEATH the stands? Needless to say I was always looking for entertainment. The other thing I remember about the rodeo as a kid was that there were a lot of cowboys smoking cigarettes and drinking beer—which coming from a non-smoking, non-drinking, somewhat religious family—made me extremely uncomfortable. The other thing I didn’t like about the rodeo as a kid was that we always sat so far away from the action. It was hard to see what was really happening.
That all changed this weekend. Well the drinking and smoking didn’t, but I came to realize that the breaks are actually not that long and this time I didn’t waste my time with all the suckers up in the stands, I got down right beside the field because my plan was to get some really nice photos. I was a little nervous just heading down there, because I didn’t know if you needed special permission or what? Well, I guess people just saw my camera and assumed I was a seasoned photographer and obviously was supposed to be there taking photos. It turns out that’s all it takes.
I had such a good time at the Rodeo on Friday night, that when my brother arrived in Lethbridge on Saturday, I talked him in to going with me for another night of photography fun. He’s got a lens that lets in more light and therefore is able to take photos later into the evening after the sun has gone down and he actually is a seasoned photographer. He gave me lots of good tips.
Anyway, Gary and I, each had our cameras out, shooting next to the Global TV camera man when we met a friendly guy from the Canadian reserves. He asked if we would mind taking a few shots of their mascot for him, since we had fancier cameras, and then just emailing him. We agreed and he gave us his card.
Well a little while later someone official looking came up to us and asked us if we had press passes. The old “carry a fancy camera and get into restricted areas” trick had used up all its juice.
But as we were getting told that if we didn’t have press passes then we would have to leave, I whipped out the business card I had just been given and explained that this guy asked us to shoot photos for him. What a stroke of luck because the guy knew who we were talking about and all of a sudden it was fine for us to be there. We were rodeo photographers again!
But the fanciest camera and all the permission in the world won’t necessarily help one to remember to set his white balance properly. I can’t believe I shot the whole night with my white balance set for fluorescent lights. Luckily Photoshop is helpful at fixing such issues. We had a lot of fun at the rodeo and Gary, as expected, got some really great rodeo photos (which he hasn’t uploaded yet).
You can check out the rest of my rodeo photos in my flickr set: Whoop-Up Days 2006.