This evening I uploaded a picture taken on May 18th, and with that my Year 25 project is complete. I took a shot every day but one: an inexplicable m0rk on December 17th.

I have mixed feelings about the final result. In some ways it’s not what I intended. I wanted each picture to represent the day, and many don’t. Plenty were taken at 2330 when I got home and realised I hadn’t done anything. I intended the project to force me into taking pictures of places and people I don’t normally photograph, but this rarely happened. For example, I started uni in September, but there are no proper images of my fellow students as I never plucked up the courage to ask them - despite them also studying photography.

There are also way too many taken on my mobile phone. This always seemed like a good idea - usually because of some rationalisation about not getting my camera out of my bag due to safety/annoying people / whatever - then I’d get home and realise the results suck.

But, having said all that, there are still plenty of photos that do represent their day, and were taken with a proper camera. I’m happy with many, and am glad I actually managed to complete the thing.

I’ve also definitely improved over the year, and I can see the images evolve. I taught myself the basics of balancing flash with ambient light, I now understand the concept of formal image composition, even if I’m not very good at it, and I’m slowly getting better at predicting the look of the final exposure before clicking the shutter. I also finally sat down and learnt how to use Lightroom, and suddenly I could properly control the shadow and highlight points while editing - I think there’s a marked improvement in the image quality thereafter.

It’s also had the intended memory-bank effect. I checked over the set this evening - there were a few omissions / duplicates, and my pride at the final 365 total was dented when I realised it’s a leap year - and kept spotting and thinking about little events I’d forgotten, which is quite pleasant. My 25th year had sad days, happy days, scary-exciting days, celebrities, and plenty of monkeys - it’ll be fun to dig through in a few years.

So it’s a mixed bag. There are more than a few images that made me wince while uploading, and again now, but there are some that came out better than I remembered, and a few I’m very happy with. I didn’t learn as much from it as I hoped, but it wasn’t a waste of time either.

I’m going to make a Blurb book of the results. I don’t have a properly colour-balanced setup, so I’ll have to play the odds and just hope they resemble what I see on screen. I’m currently struggling to download all the images and keep them in order (I don’t have a local copy, sadly), but I’m sure I’ll find a way. However it turns out, it should make a neat little momento.

Is there a Year 26 Project? So far, yes. I’ve been toying with 52 Portraits or similar, but as I’ve got into the habit I see no reason not to continue for the moment. Objectives for this year:

• Be brave
• Take fewer, better shots, on decent equipment
• Check and double-check the goddamn focus (I hate hate hate it when the focus is off)
• Learn more about lighting, and put it into practice
• Take more portraits
• Be brave

I think that’s enough to be going along with.

I was looking for pictures of tightrope walkers this evening. Flickr kept thinking I meant ‘tight rope’, which brings up very different results. *shudder*. Still, I found some cool stuff, but kept being drawn back to this guy:

Now that’s street entertainment. There’s something about this shot I really like - maybe it’s that he looks like a visitor from the past, and I’ve always had a thing for Victorian London. Whatever, it simply rocks.

I like this shot too - yikes.

Flickr launched their new video functionality last night, and it’s nicely implemented. They’re calling videos ‘long photos’, which is a decent way of approaching it. There’s a 90-second limit, only Pro members can upload, and they integrate into photostreams just like any other picture. It’s fairly snappy (although the FAQ says some older computers may struggle, in which case ‘just go to Best Buy dude’) and nothing plays automatically if you don’t want it to. Their charming FAQ explains the ins and outs.

Digital SLRs can’t record videos, so the only footage I have comes from my old Canon G3 - lost/stolen/beamed-up in a field in 2004. I had a dig through and found a surprising number of clips, but they’re almost all of my ex-girlfriend and I’ve no desire to re-visit them. Maybe in a decade or so. I did find this, though, taken on Prague’s Charles Bridge in 2003:

The upload process is a breeze compared to the morass of YouTube, and the - admittedly short - clip processed in only a few seconds. I tagged / geotagged it just like any regular photo, and it slotted into my photostream without issue. Neat, especially as their servers must be getting hammered about now.

I don’t envy the job of policing video uploads, but I’m impressed with the implementation. It’s obviously early days, but video fits into Flickr better than I expected. Their blog has a few decent examples. I can’t see me using this feature much, at least until I get a cameraphone with better video quality, but I’ll be interested to see where people take it.

PicLens should be gimmicky, but somehow isn’t. It’s a browser add-on for viewing images (plugin for IE, extension for Firefox), that understands the major photo sites. This means it can display all relevant pictures, rather than just those currently visible. It’s easier to explain with an example:

I was making mockups for a uni project this evening, and needed a picture of a juggler, with specific criteria: it had to be a full-length, side-on view. I searched for ‘juggler’ in Flickr, and the search results showed me 20 pictures per page. This was a bit slow, and by page 10 was getting frustrating - it turns out most people don’t shoot jugglers this way. Eventually it occured to me that PicLens might help. It places a small ‘play’ icon over images from supported sites, and once clicked brings up a full-screen, 3D wall of images:

PicLens understands that I’m on a Flickr search page, so performs the search progressively as I scan along the wall. The scroll wheel zooms in, and dragging left/right pans along at variable speeds. This is approximately a billion times faster than going through individual pages. I glanced at hundreds of pictures before spotting something appropriate, at which point I double-clicked it. This downloaded the high-res version and displayed it full screen - I could then jump to the photo’s Flickr page via a button at the top of the screen (although I only discovered this later after watching the tutorial video - it could do with being a little more obvious).

I’ve been merrily browsing my contacts’ photostreams and sets all evening - the wall is visually gorgeous, and it’s just good fun. Plus, photos generally look better on darker backgrounds. It’s technically polished, too: the wall appears extremely quickly and I’ve experienced no processing delay when browsing, which is impressive for a full-screen app¹. It’s possible to scan faster than new images can be downloaded, but they appear fast enough that this is rare. I should mention that it’s stalled on me a couple of times, but re-clicking the play button solved it.

PicLens supports Google Images, Yahoo Images, YouTube, Facebook and deviantART, amongst others. There’s also a Wordpress plugin to add support to individual blogs. I predict somebody will buy this company pretty sharpish. Definitely worth installing if you spend any time browsing images, imho.

1. having said that, my Firefox install is less than a week old and everything’s quick at the moment [↩]

Flickr’s having issues at the moment, but the homepage raised a smile:

Photojojo just publicly launched their Time Capsule system, which emails you twice a month with your Flickr photos from a year ago. I had a sneak preview of this, and it’s a delightful little thing: very simple, infrequent enough to retain its charm, and oddly fascinating.

Our major digital photography project this term is, roughly speaking, to create images that require a second look. The above is an idea I was playing around with this evening. Something for the workbook, anyway.

Removed today’s advent calendar image after a request from the original photographer who, indeed, briefly took the image offline to prevent it being shown. First time this has happened in the couple of years I’ve been doing it and…well, I think I’ll stop there, but I will of course do as requested. Replaced with a quick shot I took in Willesden last week.

Well, kinda. There’s an edit button above each picture that sends you straight through to the Picnik system, anyway. Is cool. Obviously no match for Photoshop, but 90% of my edits are cropping and a bit of levels adjustment, which Picnik can handle without a problem. Also useful for mobile uploads.

I’d take the one on the left for my car. I’d probably have to add the apostrophe, though.

Beginning with the likely scenario of Bucky O’Hare vs. Captain Hook:

All made using a sonic screwdriver. It’s something to do Better if you rope somebody into helping, and actually have some drawing ability - then you can get fantastic results like this, and this.

I’ve had some luck with my floods pictures from the weekend. BBC Coventry used a few of them this morning, and Yahoo News contacted me to express an interest. A shot of the dancing couple¹ hit #23 in the daily Flickr Interestingness, which I’m very happy about - I’ve never broken the top 200 before! It’s turning up in Explore and everything . I wish I’d been a bit faster with the geotagging, though - they were clearly looking for shots for the Flickr Blog today…

1. who’ve contacted me and are very nice people indeed [↩]

So yesterday’s plan to stay in all day reading Harry Potter didn’t go as planned. Stratford had a little rain overnight:

Here’s a before/after of the basin:

which is pretty bad, but further downstream it was crazy:

Not being one of the people who has to clear up, I found it very interesting. Plenty of kids, and some families, were having a great time splashing through the water on the main street, and the residents walking from their houses in wellies seemed in good spirits. These lads asked if I’d take their picture:

I emailed them a copy, although the initial address bounced back and I guessed at a correction, so hopefully they received it…I was also impressed by and jealous of this couple:

A passing child asked its mother why this was happening. The mother replied that it’s the kind of thing that happens after people have had too much to drink. Which might be true, although I prefer to think they were just having fun, but nevertheless they could actually dance. The cha-cha, unless I was mistaken. A salsa, I’m told. Isn’t that lovely? It was the best thing I saw all day

The BBC and various other organisations were filming, and there were crowds everywhere. I saw a canoeist set sail from the bandstand in the centre of town and finish a mile or so downriver.

Today the waters had receded from the main street, but parts of the basin and most of the far side of the river was still pretty bad:

and they were pumping out the Swan Theatre. My uncle lived here for ten(?) years and said he’d never seen the theatre flooded. I bet nobody thought it’d happen in July. Thankfully the waters didn’t quite make it to the Courtyard Theatre, so the RSC hasn’t had to close down completely¹. It hasn’t rained in the past 36hours that I’ve noticed, so hopefully the worst is over. The entire set of pics is here.

1. the main RST is closed until 2010; the Swan Theatre is in the same building, hence the flooding [↩]