Category: Photo

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24 Hours of Flickr

I first participated in the “a day in the life of…” group on Flickr two years ago. It was a great experience, and the created some fun posters — part collaborative art; part social networking experiment. Now Flickr has officially sponsored their own similar group.

24 Hours of Flickr will hold their own DILO-type event this coming May 5th. Anyone can join, and by posting your photos (which must be taken on May 5, 2007), you implicitly agree to having it published in a special 24 Hours of Flickr book that’s been planned.

24hoursofflickr.jpg

Of course, it’s great fun, but especially if you join in. Grab your camera, join the group, and get ready to post some pictures from your day.

Read more from the Flickr blog.

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February masthead

Vegas SkylineA while back I promised I’d be updating the site header each month. I’m not really following a theme, though so far I’ve been using photos I’ve taken.

This month, you get a panorama I stitched from a series of photos I took in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago at the Ghost Bar. It’s located on the 53rd floor of The Palms hotel, and it’s definitely a great place to go to drink in the view (and a martini or two).

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Flickr’s Christmas Easter Egg

No, they haven’t gotten their holidays mixed up, but there is a secret Easter egg sprung over at Flickr. Add a note to a photo with the text “ho ho ho hat” and you can add a Santa hat to the photo. Add a note with “ho ho ho beard” to add a nice, fluffy Santa beard.

Mess with your friends photos (you’re not really changing the photo) — it’s fun! Here are just a few examples.

Dirty Santa

A little something extra in the eggnog for A Whole Lotta Nothing for sharing this tip!

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Nakama: Moblogging Photos Made Easy

Nakama logoMost mobile phones these days come with a basic camera built-in. It’s handy for spur-of-the-moment snapshots. I’ve used it in stores to capture price and SKU info for further research, or to document that fender-bender in the parking lot.

What’s not convenient is a way to share those photos online. Sure, a lot of the mobile companies have services, but if you’re already using something like Flickr, you don’t want or need another online gallery.

A number of companies have created add-ons that allow uploads from your mobile to Flickr, including Shozu, Nokia and Yahoo’s own Zonetag. But none of these would work with my HP iPAQ hw6515.

Enter Nakama.  This free service allows you to upload photos from any mobile phone capable of sending picture messages. While Nakama does provide it’s own online gallery, the real strength is it’s ability to automatically publish uploaded photos to your Flickr, MySpace or Live Space account.

I’ve tested Nakama,  and it worked perfectly. No special software was required, just the ability to send picture messages from my phone.

One caveat — the gallery of popular photos on Nakama contains a lot of suggestive photos. They do provide a “flag as inappropriate” capability, but so far, the majority of visitors apparently approve. Personally, I don’t give a rip about their own gallery; I’m only interested in using the service to make it easy to post to Flickr. And that it does quite well.

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Fun with Flickr

My friends know that I love Flickr. Even though I could create and host my own photo blog, I find Flickr engaging, fascinating, and a wonderful place for exploration. Flickr of course was one of the first Web 2.0 sites to popularize the concept of folksonomy tagging. The social strengths of Flickr with it’s contacts, friends and family model, the commenting capabilities, and user-created groups open Flickr up for inventive uses.

BigBlue. Get yours at flagrantdisregard.com/flickrOf course Flickr has always been super-useful for collecting photos from events (like UXWEEK), but I ran across another innovative example today on the Drupal website. The Drupal team asked users to upload screen shots, then annotate them with notes. (As you move your cursor over the images, you’ll see the user notes). Yet another cool example of leveraging simple, readily available and free technology and integrating it within a work process. Nice.

Of course, most people are more interested in just pure fun. I’ve had my share of that. Two of the groups that I’ve been involved in on Flickr that were pure fun were the DILO (Day in the Life Of) and Squared Circle groups, both of which ended up producing posters in a sort of collaborative art experiment — immortalizing some really bad photographs of mine. Still, they remain a great way to have fun with Flickr.

Want more Flickr fun? The very best website for fun Flickr goodies is Flagrant Disregard’s Flickr Toys. They’ve got tons of little goodies to do things like make your own calendars, motivational posters, fake magazine covers and baseball cards, to useful tools like the profile gadget shown at the left.

You’ve got a digital camera. Get a Flickr account. Play with some toys. Be inventive. And have fun!

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Photo Friday: Panorama

This week’s Photo Friday theme is panorama. I enjoy creating panoramas and have posted a few on Flickr. But for this theme, I thought it would be fun to share the very panorama I used to create the header image you see in my blog.

Please click for a larger version.

I photographed this sunrise over Lake Elsinore on my drive to work about a year ago. I didn’t use a tripod, just eyeballing it with my 3Mp digital camera (the very one I lost at Versailles last year) and stitching it together with Photovista Panorama. Most people who see it assume it’s a coastal view, but actually it’s looking east over Lake Elsinore, from a lookout point on Ortega Highway. The clouds are hanging low over the lake, and the lights you see on the right side are the headlights of my fellow commuters, snaking their way through the Cleveland National Forest to work in Orange County.

Most people don’t bother to stop and soak in the view. What a shame.