Photography

Testing a link to Flickr photos

For the most part, I prefer to link images for my posts from my Flickr account. It helps keep the file size down if I need to move the content somewhere else. I know that some hosts provide an export file, but many seem to be just text. If I use links, rather than the photo itself uploaded to the site, my shots come with me in a text file.

How cool is that!

However, like all of the other blogging platforms I’ve used, WordPress and Flickr make it less than intuitive to share that way. I’m posting this via MarsEdit to see if I can figure out the right link and code to use.

We’ll see.

So very frustrating {Update}

{Update: It seems you can still get the old style links from Flickr if you revert back to their old style photo viewing page. At least it works for now. Hopefully they’ll fix that little glitch.}

It turns out that, without a lot of coding each time, you can’t link photos from Flickr in posts any more.

The only link Flickr gives is one with an iFrame, which WP doesn’t permit.

You can copy the individual file link, but that risks violating the Flickr terms of reference.

it seems the embed plugin for Flickr is only available in stand alone WP sites, so that’s out for now.

The only way I seem to be able to do it is using MarsEdit for now. And that may change anytime. So what’s left? Just storing my photos in yet another place here on WP.com.

What the hell is so great about photos that every site now wants you to store them there?????

Grrr.

Trying out an Olloclip attachment for the iPhone

Back at the end of March, I picked up an Olloclip lens set for my iPhone. The attachment consists of 3 lenses in a neat package that includes a case and attachment mechanisms for the iPhone 4 and 5.

The lenses included are a macro, a wide angle and a fish eye. The fish eye is on one side of the attachment, the wide angle is on the other, and the wide angle screws off to expose the macro lens behind it. Quite clever, actually. All you need to do is put the lens you want in front of the camera you want to use; front or rear facing.

Other than wishing there was a telephoto in there, I’m really quite impressed so far. Given my rudimentary iPhone camera skills, the lens set seems quite forgiving. The glass seems sharp, the set is easy to use, and the only real downside is that the camera case has to come off to get the lenses on.

I haven’t used it all that much yet, but here’s a couple of samples from the flickr feed:

Fall colour

I don’t seem to be getting out as much as I’d like to this year. That’s especially true about this fall. Not all that sure why, but that’s the way it is.

That said, back in October I did get over to Green Timbers Park with my Nikon D3S and the 28-300 lens. I walked around for a couple of hours and took a few shots, but nothing really fired me up in terms of autumn colours. There were just dull yellows, faded reds and dead greens in the trees.

I had just put my gear back into the car in the parking lot and was closing the door, when something caught my eye. Right behind the car was this lovely tree in full fall colour.

It’s interesting that I didn’t notice it when I arrived, nor again when I came back to the car from my walk. It was just as I was closing up and getting ready to leave.

Anyway, rather than take out the big Nikon guns, I snapped a couple of shots with my iPhone. I was impressed again with how much better the iPhone 4s camera is compared to the 3Gs. I’d forgotten, and I’ll have to spend more time learning to take photos with it.

I was also reminded about being open the world around you. I often tend to get focused on what I think I want and hunt for that, rather than notice the beauty that’s already right there around me. How about you? Does that world sometimes go by without you noticing too?

Do you take time for personal stuff?

I’m usually pretty good at taking time for personal projects. I think they are important, and they’ve served me well over the course of my career. But…I guess sometimes things just get too serious to play. Or, perhaps we just forget to play?

For a while, I was pretty good at processing photos and getting what I could posted on Flickr and/or Google+. However, going through the collection on my hard drive today, I noticed that I haven’t really posted anything of mine on Flickr since last March. Sheesh! Last March!. That’s terrible.

I have done a few events since March, and photos I’ve taken at those and for others are all processed and dealt with as they should be. The embarrassing thing is that all the personal stuff is just languishing there in folders.

I need to clear up the backlog and start enjoying my personal stuff again.

Time to play.

Movin’ on to Spring Next Week

Hard to believe, but the spring equinox is March 20 – that’s Tuesday next week. I love the rush of life that happens in the spring.

In Bear Creek Park in Surrey, during one of our brief sunny breaks this week, I caught these crocuses coming up among the dead leaves from last year. It’s a busy photo, but it a way, it makes a statement about the seasons we know and love: all things rest and then begin anew.

Here’s one more to herald the coming spring.

Escape from Skyrim and back to work

RPG Xbox games are not usually my cup of tea. I much prefer first person shooters to role playing games. However, on recommendation from a ‘friend’, I updated to the new Xbox and picked up a copy of the Skyrim game in early February.

Hmmmm…from the (lack of) posts over the last month or so, we can see what happened after that! Quests and bandits and dragons can be quite addicting….thank you ‘friend’ 😉

But in the end, all’s good. Along with some business networking in February, I popped out to the local parks when the sun poked out. More walkabouts and playing with the camera than any serious photography.

Early this month, I got out to Delta and to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary to see if I could see their Sandhill Cranes. Lots of ducks, coots, geese and pintails, but no cranes for me this time.

On the way back home, I stopped on the dike near the Delta Airport and got some photos of a couple of Snowy Owls nestled amongst the logs on the beach. To find them, all I had to do is look along the dike and spot the bevy of other photographers with their half-meter lenses looking seaward. Heh, it does get to be quite a show.

Over all it was an interesting day, and I learned how much more I need to learn about long lens photography. This Snowy Owl shot was done with my Sigma 120-400 lens on the Nikon D300. I used a Manfrotto ball head and tripod under the lens, but should have used a remote shutter release as well. The exif data should be accessible from the photo on Flickr, along with some other shots from the day.

The Eagles Have Landed in Delta

I caught this bad boy in a tree over near Boundary Bay Airport. A buddy of mine has been making the trek from North Delta over to the Delta Hospital in South Delta for the last couple of weeks and mentioned that the eagles were back on the flats.

I was out late last year and earlier this year, looking to see if they were around, but I guess I was too early. The big birds are sure out there now.

In one area around the airport, there were at least 5 trees with a minimum of 5 eagles sitting on their branches. Some of the farmer’s fields are full of gulls and the eagles are joining them to feed on something. Not sure what it could be, other than some rodents, or perhaps older gulls.

Anyway, the eagles are all over the place and seem quite tolerant to people right now. Usually they are pretty skittish, but this fellow was in the middle of a off-leash dog park, so he’s probably use to people and dogs running around under his tree.

Fighting That ‘Mushroom’ Feeling

In a sense, I’ve been feeling like a bit of a mushroom lately. In the dark, getting fed nothing but…. Well, you know the story. This time of year is like that on the wet coast. The days largely are short, dark and wet.

However, a bit of respite today. In a fit of energy and patience, I spent several hours going through the many storage discs where I’ve squirrelled away photos over the last 6 years or more. Some of it was before I had any idea about the number of images I’d be managing, so it was pretty random in terms of file type, folder names, location, etc.

It was just time to get to it and pull it all together.

Now, most of the photos are managed by year and folder, the folder having a date and a name that tells me a where the photos were taken. An example would be “12-01-23 Green Timbers” for photos taken today at Green Timbers Park. Well, it would be if I had taken any photos today 😉 But you get the idea.

The one problem I haven’t solved is the overlapping file names. With multiple cameras all using the same naming system, I’m bound to get into a situation where I try to bring two of them together with the same name, like _DWS2952. But, we’ll deal with that when we come to it. So far, so good.

After all the work today, my photos are organized and stored both on my iMac and on a Drobo external drive. I also have an Apple Time Machine backup to a Time Capsule and another overnight copy of the iMac made to an iOmega drive. I just have to arrange one more thing, and that’s an offsite storage drive for the whole thing.

Bottom line: I have 4 copies of my photos at home, and those are in danger of being all taken out at once by fire. That last copy offsite is critical, but I’m loath to spend a fortune for cloud storage right now. A physical arrangement will have to do – perhaps rotating drives to a safe deposit box or something.

Ah, the joys of digital data. At least it’s cheap to make copies.

Boundary Bay Regional Park

After reading on Miss 604’s blog about Snowy Owls being seen around Boundary Bay, I headed out to Boundary Bay Regional Park to see what I could see.

No Snowy Owls for me, but I did spot a Great Blue Heron that seemed somewhat ok with me taking a few shots. I took a couple of photos right away with my D700 and s/he didn’t seem too concerned about me stopping along the trail.

After that, I pulled off my pack and got out the D300 with a Sigma 120-400 lens a knocked off a few more shots. By then, the heron had scrunched it’s neck down and kind of looked like s/he was saying – “what are you going to do next. Should I take off or not”.

As it turned out, I was the one that took off and the heron went back to doing what herons do in the middle of a regional park.

There were a few eagles around the farms near the Delta airport, but they were too far out to catch a good shot. I’ll try another day. I’ve sussed out a few places to get back to now.

On another note, when I was looking up the link for the Snowy Owl post on Miss 604, I ran across a photo I took out at White Rock a while ago. It was in a post about ‘Bite of White Rock’, an annual restaurant event aimed at getting people out to sample the local scene in January and early February. That’s neat to get a photo credit on a popular blog like Miss 604. Thanks Rebecca!