A change in my Flickr life

Up to two months ago I was posting in Flickr a mix of good and not-so-good photos but didn’t want to post in Flickr all my photos, I had my own photo gallery for the bulk of them. However, that changed and now I have two Flickr photostreams: my main photostream for the photos I like most and my other photostream for the bulk of them all, where you might find photos you like more than me! — and this has happened already.

From now on, I will mostly follow a predictable flow of publication: whenever I get a photo I really like –or go to a place and want to link you to the bulk of photos I took there, even if no one are really good– I will post one or two photos in my main photostream, which will link to the bulk set of photos. Photos from friends and family will go to my other photostream –with appropriate access control– and only if I get a really good one –and permission to publish it– will I post it in my main photostream for the joy of everyone.

That said, you may want to visit or watch my other photostream to check for new photos even if there is no change in my main photostream. I will be happy with people adding me (private-miguev) as contact, but will rarely add people as contact from that account and very few will be marked as friend in that account. If you want to (social) network with me, please use my main (miguev) account.

There is yet something I’m not completely happy with about Flickr: their maps. Being used to Google Maps I find myself quite disappointed when I see how old Flickr maps are, quite inappropriate for accurately placing photos. This is why I am also using Panoramio, which lets me place photos very accurately and they may even get selected to be displayed in Google Earth. And you can always have a look at the map of all my photos in Panoramio.

The perfect moment

I wanted to wait until the end of this year, but in my last visit to Tenerife, my father scared me with this:

Nikon has stopped manufacturing the D80 and Maya knows about it, that’s why they are selling it so cheap. The D200 price dropped €200 a couple of days before the D300 was announced. Now the next DSLR must be about to be announced.

He told me that on June 26th and the new Nikon D700 was announced on July 1st, so he was right! Knowing how damn good he is for this kind of thing, I ran to Maya (Nikon’s representative in Tenerife) just before taking my flight back to Ireland but they didn’t have any D80 body left, all sold out! Luckily they had a kit without lenses and I could take its body, only because we have been regular customers from about 30 years

After having this camera (well, my father’s) for a couple of weeks (see some photos) I learned many things and took a few decisions. I already told you about one but that was only to be expected, probably everyone was just waiting for me to realize. The one no one would expect is that I intend to use my DSLR nearly as a film camera, but that will be another post… some day

In the end…

…Flickr is my winner. This is a bit of WTF, many –if not most– people use Flickr and they are pretty happy with it, why should I not?

Well, I had a few strong reasons to run my own gallery using Gallery on a Dreamhost hosted account:

• store as much as Dreamhost lets me, which is over 20GB and increases every month!
• keep granular control on what can each user do with each photo
• upload photos using rsync
• or just digiKam
• have an album-tree hierarchy replicating the one in my hard drive
• and I could use SSL at any time I wanted

I just want to put my pictures on the Internet as a backup, surely Dreamhost do backups better than me! But some pictures had to be restricted, so I needed users (accounts) and access control. This was both very important and a bad pain, specially because users are lazy and very few were willing to have yet another username and password, so they ended up not seeing the pictures.

So suddenly I realized that I don’t need too granular access control and Flickr’s private groups will do the trick nicely, Flickr no longer have storage or bandwidth limits on Pro accounts and I wouldn’t have to bother my friends with yet another username and password they would not use –because, I insist, they are lazy… me too

At first I wished to make Gallery use Gmail to authenticate users, but never had the time to implement this and neither did anybody else. Later on I realized, weird as it sounds, I had friends refusing to use Gmail :-O

Well, Internet is free (as free spech, not free beer… that made me thirsty, I miss the Guinness so much after two weeks on antiboitics…) but luckily they all use Flickr, at least just enough to login and see pictures. That’s fine, I don’t care where they upload their pictures (Picassaweb, SmugMug, Tuenti, … Whatever) as long as they can login in Flickr, and they do.

There is yet the problem of having a friend download all that weekend’s pictures in a zip with a few clicks, there is no free (of charge) way to do it yet. In exchange, I get a very nice bulk editing facility, the Organizer. For the zip download I can just zip them myself and post the zip in my blog, optionally password proteceted.

Yet I suddenly realize of how really good is having each picture in none or more sets, so that there is a nice and easy way to browse through photos from that weekend and that beatiful friend too. Of course you can use tags, but not for slideshows.

So why not any other? Dropshots looked good in the ad, but when I tried it out… no tags, not intended to publish and worst of all no fully-working link to web uploader. Atpic is soo simple that it’s a bit too simple for me, no AJAX, no bulk edit… imagine having to move 30 pictures without bulk editing! Phanfare has SSL for login (Atpic and Dropshot hasn’t) but requires Java 1.5+ or Flash 9.0+ or Windows or Mac and I’m not willing to use any plataform-dependent software for my pictures.

Actually I use digiKam, which I don’t know to be easy to install in Windows or Mac, but the databse is just SQLite 3 and it’s really easy to extract all information from it. Try that with iPhoto, Picassa or any other.

So in the end I user Flickr not only to post my best pictures but also all my pictures as a backup and an easy way to keep them reachable by authorized people only –which is everybody for public pictures.

For the pictures I have already uploaded to my primary Flickr account (miguev) I have two options: (a) delete it, if it has no comments, no notes and nobody call it a favorite (which means no body will miss it) or (b) redirect to it from the new copy in my secondary (backup) Flickr account (private miguev), like this.

So, let’s the show get started. I have just over 6000 photos, not including some trips!

Spot the difference

I took these two pictures in a visit to Luxembourg City, with just one minute difference, from the very same place, I didn’t move:

So, what’s the difference?

Hint: look at the EXIF properties from both pictures (top and bottom) but don’t get distracted by the fact that Nikon FM-2n is not supposed to write EXIF

Batch noise reduction with The GIMP

Since I’ve been shooting film in Ireland, I’ve been facing scanning noise even with low grain films. It was my father who wisely suggested a Selective Gaussian Blur filter to reduce this noise, with parameters blur radii = 3 and delta max = 176.

Applying this filter with GIMP in a one by one basis is fine for a few files but, even though I don’t usually post many film pictures, it started to be quite annoying having to do this interactively. New challenges have driven me to the necessity of scripting this, using GIMP for preference.

Best option seems to be GIMP Batch Mode, which lets you do the same operation on a blob of files. This nice feature (file-blob) is available from GIMP 2.2 and at this point GIMP 2.4 is already available!

meet D5

Last saturday I managed to go to the meet D5 with the meet Dublin Flickr group.

It was a nice day with clouds and run rays coming and going all the time, the kind of days I prefer rather than a sunny day. Apart of the lovely weather I also met nice people and enjoyed myself risking anything to get the shot I wanted and eventually having dinner –once more– at the Market Bar.

From this time I have posted only 12 pictures in Flickr, but the whole lot can be seen in my (new) bulk album: pics.miguev.net, to which I will –someday– upload all the pictures in my hard drive, mainly for backup purposes.

See also the pictures from the people who joined D5: decsramble, DublinWolf, Eriçk, Ilja, Nicola T and Sofavile. Thanks Ilja for the Flickr goodies!

For the film shots we’ll have to wait until Monday since I’m dropping the roll on Saturday and will collect it on Monday. Hopefully

Update: I’ve uploaded the film shots for this meet Dublin –only the good ones

Why I stick to film photography

At the moment, 195 of my 655 photos at Flickr are from film. That’s a good 30%.

When people ask me why I stick to film photography –sometimes incorrectly called analog photography, just in contrast with digital photography– I usually don’t know what to answer. I don’t know which one of the many reasons I have should I tell. Well, anyone looking just for a comparison can look it up on the Wikipedia, what I provide here is just my personal point of view.

A quick answer could be just because I can, since film photography is worth if you enjoy it. It’s not worth for most people, who want just to take as many pictures as they can and with immediate feedback. Digital photography is easier, quicker and far cheaper… once you get the camera, which can cost anything up to €4000.

A not-so-quick answer will be because I can afford it, meaning that I can’t afford any digital camera that would let me do the same I can do with my film cameras. Extrange as it sounds, film photography is the cheapest option for my to do photography, since I mean photography as a hobby art, not just taking pictures.

However, money is only a limitation –just like gravity, and more about it later– but not a motivation. What really motivates me to keep shooting film –and will keep me even after getting the DSLR I want– are those precious features only film has.

Back from holidays

It wasn’t that I was on holidays somewhere far far away and incommunicated, away from any computer, enjoying myself in a caribbean beach, drinking something colorful with an umbrella in it.

Certainly not, it wasn’t quite like that.

It was more like being absent from my own life due to having my sweet teenager sister at home for two months, not having time to write in my (main) blog and actually having not much to write about anyway.

Even when I thought I was back, it was only a partial return because I was, at last, on holidays! My family came to Dublin and we had a nice time walking about in Dublin and driving around Galway.

I thought I liked Dublin up until I saw Galway… I love it!

I fell in love with this city, if I ever wanted to send IT to $HELL and take a sabbatical year, I would go to Galway and get a relaxed job –supposing I couldn’t afford not working at all. This is actually what one of the Kinlay House Galway friendly staff members is doing at the moment, after some years working as system administrator in Spain.

Even my sister, being fed up of the irish weather, said she wouldn’t mind to live in Galway. I think she wasn’t aware of the weather she would have there

But it’s true that if there is any city in Ireland for her, Galway is it. Music hangs in the air… everywhere!

We enjoy ourselves a lot and spent nice days together, but eventually my family flew back to Tenerife and I was alone for a couple of days.

A bit of a rest, I have to admit, before a friend came to Dublin for Erasmus. This has made these last days a bit of interesting times but it’s nice to have her around.

Now I have this friend here and another friend in University College Cork, enjoying the Erasmus grant I was denied last year. As my mother says, sometimes the best thing that can happen to you is not getting what you want. Yet I really hope to get what I want know! Stay tuned in case I do

Couple change

Before moving to Ireland I had already taken an interest on traditional Irish music instruments. Leaving apart my platonic love for bodhrán, I set my eyes on the stringed instruments: the banjo and the mandolin, somehow similar to the lute which I used to play (or at least try) back in Spain, playing Canary Islands traditional music.

I haven’t seen many Irish musicians playing neither the mandolin nor the Irish bouzouki, which made me hesitate, specially after having listened to several banjo players and discovering that I love its sound.

Further considerations and advice from two (musicians) friends have led me to make up my mind, with the result you can see here. For the same money I could have gotten a cheap (and rather crappy) banjo I got this nice mandolin instead.

I hope this will compensate my last lost.

Bloomsday is gone

As I suspected, I couldn’t finish reading Ulysses before Bloomsday. I’ve only read about 200 of the nearly 900 pages of Ulysses and I’m reading its Spanish translation, but it’s still damn hard to follow. I hope next year I’ll have read it.

In the meantime, I spend this weekend enjoying the Street Performance World Championship at Merrion Square. It has been a very nice weekend, one of the best I’ve had in Ireland so far

I took quite a few digital pictures, instead I shot two 35mm rolls and I’ve just dropped them at Gunn’s today. I don’t think that the pictures will be ready soon, I still have to post the pictures from my last B&W roll, which I collected today.

While you keep on developing your patience with me you can enjoy the video with the last stance of The Space Cowboy, amazing guy!