Blog entries tagged with "flickr"

It has now been two years since I got back from my big US trip and started a new job. For the following year and a bit I rarely picked up my camera, but over the last nine or so months I have been making up for that with some travel, some photo walks, some photography meetups and other events.

Though those who follow me online will have seen more photos than that as for the past couple of months I have been spending a lot of time sorting through the post-processing photos in my todo folder.

This resulted in the following albums:

• Latrobe Valley 2011
• Walhalla 2011
• Point Cook 2012
• To, from and near Mansfield
• Canberra 2011
• South East NSW 2011 (and a bit more)
• Central Victoria 2012
• Sydney 2012
• Auckland 2013
• East Gippsland 2012
• Light trails
• South Gippsland 2013
• Between Melbourne and Canberra
• Google+ 2nd Anniversary Photowalk
• Alfred Nicholas Memorial Gardens
• Warbirds Downunder 2011
• Along the Yarra
• Australia Day 2015
• White Night 2014
• Mornington Peninsula 2011
• Mordialloc 2015
• St Kilda 2014
• Odds and ends

Looking back I didn’t realise how long this list would be, I makes me even happier that I have caught up.

Six years ago we moved offices from the middle of Clayton campus to out on Blackburn Road. It took them six months, but eventually they renovated around us enough for most of us to move into a new open plan area towards the back of the building.

On the day we moved I took some photos, including this one of my old desk:

For a few years now I have had a Google Alert setup to notify me of mentions of my own name as well as links to my site. I haven’t received that many alterts, but most of the time I can immediately recognise it as a blog/twitter/flickr/etc post that I have recently made. Other times it is related to another Stephen Edmonds (there are a few around).

Today I got an alert referencing an article by ZDNet Australia titled Govt plans keep RailCorp CIO post empty. I followed the link, to see my i mage of an empty desk. Now, if that were the quality of desk that RailCorp is giving its CIO, then it is no wonder that it is still empty. Yes, yes, I know that my image is just being used to illustrate a point.

It is at this point that some people I know would be jumping up and shouting that they can’t do that, they should be paying to use your image, etc, etc. Bah, this is exactly what I wanted to happen by making the image available as Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike – (CC BY-SA). By the way, regarding those people that would jump up and down, they hand over all sorts of personal info and photos to a US company known for questionable privacy practices, so you can guess what I do with their opinions on this matter…

Now, I wish they were using a better image – not what a camera club judge would refer to as a ‘record shot’ – but this brought a smile to my face as I think it is the first time that an image of mine has been used AND correctly attributed.

For the past three days I have been up at Halls Gap in the Grampians with the camera club. Although I returned home yesterday, I took an extra day of leave because I knew that in addition to the long drive, the weekend itself would be tiring because of late nights and early mornings.

So today I didn’t do much, except some photo sorting. Although I did do a little bit of sorting through my photos from the weekend (mostly getting them off the laptop I borrowed) I decided that it would be better to return to the backlog.

The previous weekend I went out to Healesville Sanctuary on the Saturday, and then to the biannual Air Pageant at the Point Cook RAAF Museum on the Sunday. It was the Point Cook photos that I turned to.

This day really made me regret selling my 75-300mm lens when I sold my Canon 400d. Although it was the kit lens, by definition cheap, it would have given me reach that my 17-85mm lens just does not have. I also could have thought ahead and asked at the camera club. Borrowing a 28-300mm would have been excellent as I would have only needed one lens, but borrowing a 70-200mm f/4 would have been good as well.

The big downside of having a maximum focal length of 85mm was that most of what could have been good shots were just too small in the frame which meant that when cropped down they were too noisy with not enough detail. I shot 2000 photos on the day and my first pass brought the count down to 262. My efforts today brought that down further to the 58 that are now up on Flickr.

The weather was a bit ordinary for an airshow. Mostly overcast with patches of blue sky. That worked for some shots as it cast a moody feel:

While at other times the break in the clouds gave both lighting and a contrasting backdrop:

See Point Cook Air Pageant 2010 for all of the images.

Something else that I have done with this set is to try to give each image a unique name, not just “Place/Event (#)”. This did take extra time, but it is something that I should be doing. Plus it makes the subject of the photo much easier to identify.

As promised last week I have continued working through my backlog of photos and have processed my photos from Brisbane last year. And this is despite being distracted first be the ISS and then the sunset.

The photos are a mixed bag:

Water and wildlife:

Buildings:

Cityscapes (day and night):

Brisbane 2009

On Friday night the Waverley Camera Club met up at Beacon Cove (aka near Station Pier) for a night shoot.

As we sat on the boardwalk eating fish and chips the sky quickly changed through:

Sunset from Beacon Cove

My final selection of 21 photos are all in the Flickr set. They may look a bit repetitive – there are only so many different shots of a sunset – but this has been thinned down a lot.

Today I knuckled down and sorted through photos, resulting in two new sets on Flickr. I still have a lot more sorting through as I am still four months behind.

The first set is from a Sunday morning in August when I walked around some of Melbourne’s laneways and arcades with the camera club:

Melbourne laneways and arcades

The other set I uploaded to Flickr was from one lunchtime where I walked over to campus for the specific purpose of taking some photos. This was related to a competition we were running at the time for students and staff to submit photos to appear on the my.monash login page. Although we were not eligible, it was a good enough reason to get over to campus.

Monash Uni – Clayton

The next lot of photos I have to sort are those from Brisbane, when I wandered around Brisbane CBD and Southbank on the day before OSDC2009.

In the last week of November I headed up to Brisbane for the sixth Australian Open Source Developers’ Conference and over the three days of the conference I took a lot of photos. Yesterday I completed sorting through them and uploaded 177 of them to Flickr across four sets.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter, identi.ca or Facebook would have seen me commenting as the conference unfolded, but here is a pictorial summary of what I consider to be the highlights.

OSDC2009 – Day 1

The conference began with a talk from Karen Pauley on Understanding Volunteers:

Richard Jones discovered issues with MacBooks an some projectors:

Paul Fenwick told us about the awesome things we missed in Perl:

Adam Kennedy brought us up to date on Padre:

With the day closing with lightning talks:

OSDC2009 – Day 2

On short notice Marty Pauley gave a great talk on simplicity:

Then later in the day Arjen Lentz let us know that failure is not an emergency:

With the day concluding with lightning talks:

OSDC2009 – Dinner

At dinner a certain someone garnered lots of attention by dressing up for his dinner talk:

While everyone else was challenged to illustrate in Play-doh how removing something can be a feature:

OSDC2009 – Day 3

On the final day we heard about Google Wave:

contained more lightning talks:

Before being closed by Pia Waugh talking about open source in government:

It was again a great conference, that I really need to speak at again next year. My only regret this year was that I had to fly back on the Friday night. It would have been better if I had hung around and flown back on the Saturday like I did last year.

Tonight I finally got around to sorting through the photos I took at the past three Web Standards Group meeetings:

• Web Standards Group (February 2009)
• Web Standards Group (May 2009)
• Web Standards Group (July 2009)

These photos are a mixture of the presenters:

the hosts:

the attendees:

and some food:

Now the question is: when is the next meeting?

Sunday week ago I went on the third Melbourne Photo Walk. I have just completed sorting through the photos and uploading them to Flickr.

How I have processed them is a bit of a mixture. The range from pretty much as shot:

to HDR processed that start to look unnatural:

I also played around with the levels of a few to make silouhettes:

All of the images can be seen in the set: Melbourne Photo Walk #3 (July 2009)

Now I really need to get back to the photos I took a few weeks ago on the WCC outing to Macedon as well as the photos from the past three Web Standards Group meetings…

A few days ago I went into the city for the photo walk that I had previously mentioned.

After catching a train into the city I was quite surprised about how many other people had turned up, I think at least 15.

The walk was quite enjoyable and after Docklands we ended up going past the new exhibition centre to Flinders Street Station. Most people headed home, but a couple of us went for a coffee/beer. I intend to go along on the next one. Whenever that will be.

I took over 500 photos (in RAW which means 5GB of data) and I have just finished sorting through them and uploading the final 67 to a set on Flickr.

I still need to add proper descriptions (instead of the timestamp) and choose which ones to add to the group pool. It is interesting to see others have already added to the pool as it allows me to compare how other people saw the same situation.

Last night Damien and I spent a few hours taking photos from various places around Eastlink before heading over to East Malvern where they had shut down the freeway to remove the pedestrian over-bridge. I have just finished uploading a selection of the photos to Flickr and here are some of them:

Eastlink at night

Removing the East Malvern pedestrian bridge

I also uploaded a couple of other recent(ish) photos:

Sunset on clouds from my window:

A handheld shot of the city at night:

and finally Alfie in his attention grabbing pink top:

I have just finished sorting through my photos from the conference and have uploaded the better ones to Flickr in a set for each day:

• OSDC2008 – Day 1
• OSDC2008 – Day 2
• OSDC2008 – Day 3

Almost all of them are of people in between the talks or in the evening at the dinner or at various pubs.

The photos I took of presenters as they were presenting didn’t come out the best, the 50mm f/1.8 would have been very nice. Despite this I am glad that I resisted the impluse to go and buy one as I ended up being the winning bidder for a secondhand one, at half the retail price.

Of all of the photos, this one requires to be singled out:

I have a lot more other photos from Sydney. I should be able to sort through them soon.

I have uploaded photos from last Monday’s WSG meeting:

Web Standards Group (November 2008) – a set on Flickr

In time for tomorrow’s Web Standards Group meeting I have uploaded photos from the September meeting:

Web Standards Group (September 2008) – a set on Flickr

After a long delay I have finally caught up with putting my photos from Melbourne Perl Mongers and the Web Standards Group up on Flickr:

• Melbourne Perl Mongers (June 2008)
• Melbourne Perl Mongers (August 2008)
• Web Standards Group (August 2008)

At some later point I need to change the name of each photo to be descriptive, not just the image filename.

Last Monday was the last week of the digital SLR course that I was doing with David. After covering long exposures we covered exposure, perspective, depth of field and (not) using the flash. From this I have added some more photos to the Flickr set.

These include the stereotypical flower for depth of field:

double exposure using an external flash twice in a long exposure:

and using long exposure again, but with a moving sparkler and the external flash:

I would recommend the course to anyone.

Last night was the third week of the digital SLR course, and this time we were outside taking long exposures:

If you look carefully you can see the fire truck.

On the second week we were assigned some homework to get photos of moving water and to do some panning which David and I went out to get on Saturday afternoon down at Dandenong Creek. At 3 seconds the water flowing around the rocks looked more like fog than water:

More photos can be found in a Flickr set and I will be adding to it as the course proceeds.

Last week contained both a Perl Mongers meeting and a Web Standards Group meeting. I have just finished sorting through the photos I took and have uploaded the best (not so much for WSG) to Flickr.

Wednesday night was Perl Mongers at a new location, across the road from Federation Square. Wes brought along his 50mm f/1.4 lens which is a significant improvement over the 50mm f/1.8 lens that I had used previously.

Melbourne Perl Mongers (May 2008) – a set on Flickr

(That raspberry wheat beer was very popular…)

On the Thursday night was a WSG meeting, tied in with the Web Directions South conference, where I was back to borrowing the 50mm f/1.8 lens. There was hardly any light and the lens (and camera) really struggled.

Web Standards Group (May 2008) – a set on Flickr

While most of the photos look ok when small, some are really bad when the large versions are viewed. Adjusting the light levels just made it worse.

The upshot of all this is that I have more practical experience with different lenses and I now know that in the situation where a 50mm lens (on a crop body) is suitable, I should really get the f/1.4 over the f/1.8. A pity about the massive price difference.

Last night I went to the April Web Standards Group meeting where Gerry Gaffney talked about how users really search and John Allsopp talked about the web away from the desktop, in particular on mobile devices.

But that isn’t really what I want to talk about.

In a repeat of the recent Perl Mongers meeting I borrowed a co-workers 50mm f/1.8 lens. This time I kept the lens on my camera all night as it was working really well.

At the venue there was hardly any light but I was able to get some shots:

Downlight above Gerry, reflection from the projected image and light from the laptop screen.

John was directly lit by the projector, downlight for the background.

Light from behind the bar.

In this case the narrow angle of view at the 50mm turned out to be what was needed as I was able to take these photos from the other side of the room. It is definitely something to consider in my future lens choice.

One other change I made was that instead of having the camera in aperture priority with it wide open, I had it in shutter priority at (mostly) 1/25 second in order to freeze action with the intention of lightening the photos later if they were a bit too dark. It turns out that I only needed to do that to one photo that had nowhere near enough light.

Wednesday week ago, Melbourne Perl Mongers was held at a new location in Southbank followed by dinner and drinks at the Town Hall Hotel in South Melbourne.

This afternoon I finally got around to sorting through the photos and uploading a select few to flickr:

Melbourne Perl Mongers (April 2008) – a set on Flickr

For the night I borrowed what a co-worker refers to as his “nifty fifty”, a 50mm f/1.8 lens. This is a pretty cheap and inexpensive lens, so I wanted to try one out before getting one. This was also my first opportunity to use my new camera bag, a Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home.

I found that f/1.8 is a big improvement over the f/2.8 of my 28mm lens, but being 50mm it is too narrow which meant I didn’t use it for much of the night.

When talking to Wes I found that even though he has the better 50mm f/1.4 lens, he is finding that it is too narrow and is thinking about the faster 28mm lens.

That Canon 28mm f/1.8 lens is very temping as it gives a ‘normal’ angle of view on a crop body and is nice and fast due to its wide aperture. It also doesn’t hurt that it it a USM lens as the motor in the 28mm f/2.8 is slow and loud. What would hurt is the price and that it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as available secondhand as the f/2.8 is.

I had also lined up a Speedlite 430EX flash to borrow for the night but that fell through at the last minute because its owner had to make a decision between catching the body or the flash before they encountered the floor. The flash is what ended up breaking.

This coming Wednesday is a Web Standards Group meeting which will give me another opportunity to experiment in low light.

Due to venue issues, there was no Melbourne Perl Mongers last night. Instead there was a ‘Pub Mongers’, sort of the same thing except entirely at the pub with no planned talks.

But that didn’t stop Paul:

Pub Mongers (March 2008) – a photoset on Flickr.

One other change is that I didn’t bother taking my laptop along as the most I have used it for at a meeting for a long time is making a note of something to look up later. What I did take along was my good camera.

I only took along the kit 18-55mm lens (instead of the 28mm F2.8 lens I also have) as I still haven’t got a better walkaround lens (looking at a EF-S 17-85mm IS lens on eBay). This still gave me some experience in pretty bad light so hopefully things will only improve.

Continuing my plan on going to as many community events as I can I should be repeating this next week at Pub Standards Melbourne.

Yesterday, two weeks after assembling them, I got around to taking photographs of the Lego sets that had been stored in the roof. They are available for all to see in a Flickr set.

The technique I used for the photos was near a window with sheer curtains drawn and on top of some off-white paper. I ended up using the flash as there wasn’t quite enough light. I’m thinking about getting (probably make one) a lightbox to make it a lot easier to take photos like this. And a tripod. I tried to take all of the photos from the same angle and a tripod would really have been appreciated.

What I have photographed so far is only the discrete sets that we had. There is a lot of older mixed bricks that could be used for anything, and don’t forget my Technic sets that have been (most of them) on display (of sorts) since I last played with them.

While I was taking photos continued on and photographed all of my father’s die-case Dinky Toys that had been brought down from the roof. They are also available in a Flickr set with (usually) three shots per toy.

The challenge with these ones was identifying what each one was. dinkytoys.ch was a huge help with most of the toys. For others a google image search with various keywords eventually turned up a reasonably confident answer.

As these will all be packed back up and returned to the roof (for the time being at least), the photos will help us know what is actually up there. And by making them available it should help others identify their own toys, in addition to existing resources of course.

Yesterday Damien and I went on our first ride since last May, what was planned as a nice big loop that included Belgrave and Croydon.

First we went via Scoresby and Upper Ferntree Gully to Belgrave:

The new bridge for the Eastlink Trail is well underway at the south end of Jells Park:

And, despite the website saying otherwise, the upgraded trail south of Ferntree Gully Road is open:

all the way to where Eastlink crosses the Dandenong Creek in Mulgrave:

But some landscaping and cleanup is still to be done.

Since it drizzled for much of the ride to Belgrave we decided to catch the train to Ringwood and continue riding from there:

Paths near the Ringwood Bypass are done, but not yet open:

And the upgraded path through Koomba Park has been open for six months now:

Apart from the drizzle it was an enjoyable ride and once Eastlink is complete there will be a decent network with many combinations to enjoy.

Part of what we skipped was a loop from Bayswater to Croydon (via the Tarralla Creek Trail), Ringwood (via the Upper Mullum Mullum Creek Trail) and back to Bayswater:

Some more photos are available in my Bike paths and Eastlink (January 2008) Flickr set.

A few days ago I finally got around to doing something about the copyright infringement I discovered many weeks ago: I asked the Commons Help desk and got a helpful response. However, before I uploaded my images to Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license I wanted to actually have this site under the same license.

A few additions (HTML head, blog sidebar, page footer) later and I am now stating that all of the content on this blog and in my computer collection is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I also jumped over to my flickr account and set the license for all of my existing and future photos.

I think my next step will be to tag the photos in the collection, initially via the "Copyright" Exif metadata tag and then via XMP. Once I figure out what that is.

Scratch that. My immediate next step is to address the copyright infringement…

Last night and this afternoon I finally got around to putting the better photos from the airshow up on Flickr:

– Australian International Airshow 2007

I haven’t quite finished putting meaningful titles and tags on all of the photos…

I have just returned from the Airshow. Apart from a few things (the incident in the Burnley tunnel delaying our journey, it being windy and dusty, poor traffic management leaving the carpark) it was well worth it.

I ended up taking around 500 photos although a large number of those were taken using the continuous mode on my camera in order to try and capture a good shot of the aerial displays. I’m not going to sort through them (and upload them to Flickr) until sometime next week as I am going to wait until I can get a copy of the photos Damien took.

Although in the last week I have uploaded some other photos:

• Puffing Billy (February 2006)
• Fire Services Museum
• Steamrail Open Weekend 2007
• Melb.PM March 2007
• Dandenong Police Paddocks Reserve (March 2007)

Thanks to Boing Boing I just found out that the Los Angeles Fire Department has a blog and a Flickr stream.

As these are maintained by the media and public relations department of the LAFD it is obvious that there won’t be any negative posts or photos. But that doesn’t matter as there are plenty of photos and commentary (in the blog posts) to satisfy the voyeur in anyone.

It would be great if more organisations (such as the MFB) followed suit.

Last night I uploaded the photos I took two weeks ago while wandering through the city.

I still need to add titles and descriptions but I did geotag them…

A few days ago I decided that I would use Flickr for my photos instead of continuing my manual system or installing an existing package such as Gallery. Although I don’t have as much control over what I can do with sharing the photos there is the advantage of now have to worry about any bandwidth usage but more importantly there is a greater chance that people will see and possibly comment on my photos.

Since then I have moved the sets that I had already made available over to flickr and added some rudimentary integration by automatically showing the thumbnails in their place. My next step is to go through all of my photos and add them as well…