Flickr Off

There was a time in my internet life that I used Flickr on a daily basis. The professionally focused photo sharing site was a great way to post my favourite pictures of life, activities and lots and lots of action figures. I enjoyed being part of a social group that shared in each other’s achievements and were really supportive as ew each developed our photography skills.

But times changed, and suddenly we all had cameras in our phones and the idea of posting to Flickr lost it’s lustre. Where I used to go away for the weekend and come home with a few dozen photos to sort, now I had hundreds to scroll through, the vast majority of which were slight variations on the ones either side as I snapped off a bunch back to back.

I also became a dad, and kids take up a lot of time. 

It became so much easier to just post instantly to Twitter or Whatsapp to family members. Going then and posting to Flickr seemed like such an additional chore, and I quickly let it slip away. I’m fairly certain that I paid for a year or two or Pro membership in the last few years that I hardly ever used. 

So it has been that my once beloved Flickr account has sat idle, the last upload being from December 2015. It still contains hundreds of photos that I have no other easy to access backup of, and quite possibly, no backup, end of story. It has photos of family, friends, toys, personal projects, favourite foods, and filled with countless treasured memories. 

Flickr, once an independent site, was a bought by Yahoo a number of years ago, but recently was sold again. The new company have made some... changes. Lots of the changes are great. New upload features, new streamlined login, a renewed focus on professional photography. But the biggest change is to the storage service.

Up until now Flickr has had unlimited upload. I have well over the new 1,000 photos limit on my account. As of early January that simply meant I couldn’t upload anything new unless I deleted down to less than 1,000 myself, or paid for a Pro membership. Not really an issue given that, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve stopped using Flickr, apart from occasionally returning to relive or reshape memories.

But, on February 5th, things change. As of that date, if you have more than 1,000 photos on you account and have not updated to Pro, everything older than your most recent 1,000 pictures will be deleted. Gone. Forever. No backsies.

And thus my time on Flickr has come to an end. Rather than simply lose everything, I archived and downloaded everything, including the titles and associated data. This was, thankfully, made painless through a feature on the site itself.

They’re now all safely on my hard drive, and right now, I’m uploading all those, literally thousands of photos, to my online Google Photos. I’ll be looking forward to going through all of them soon and sorting them into folders, and maybe sharing some wonderful memories on my Twitter. Some are hilariously low resolution compared to what I can take with even my old photo today. It really is a nostalgia trip.

I’ll be leaving Flickr as is for a while, but intend to delete the everything off that too eventually.

Finally, I want to close out but saying that, while the new Flickr isn’t for me, I’m excited to see what comes of it in the future. I hope this all leads to a rebirth of sorts and they find a way to make the site relevant again. I had a good time with the site once.

But, goodbye for now, Flickr. 

Snapshot

As some of you may have noticed I haven't really been posting anything to my Flickr account in a long time. In fact, it's been a very long time since I was posting regularly on it at all. It not that I haven't been doing anything. Far from it. I have tonnes of photos from June when we had visitors staying, as well as a bunch of other random photos I've taken, all waiting patiently to be uploaded when I see fit to commit to it.

I'd love to share some photos of the city as it shifts from summer to winter, but, unfortunately, I no longer have a camera. My much loved Canon Powershot died long before we made the trip to Canada, simply from massive overuse. The sensor just could not operate any longer, and with a heavy heart, I had to let it go[1]. For a while after we got here I was using Claire's old Samsung, but that too has decided to cease functioning.

I'm still trying to justify buying a Canon G12, but right now we really can't afford to spend that kind of money on what is, after all, a luxury item. I know there are alternatives to the G series, particularly the S series, which is apparently the same internals with a different body and slightly cheaper. But I like the look and feel of the G12, so that's definitely what I'm shooting for.

Admittedly, I'd happily consider a second hand G11 as well, but it would have to be in damn near mint condition, and significantly cheaper than a new G12 for me to think about taking it.

I'm not asking for much, just perfection. Like everything else in my life.

[1]- While looking up an appropriate site to link to about the A95 I discovered that that model was subject to a flaw in the sensor, resulting in distortions in the image... The exact distortions I was seeing. Canon would have repaired my beloved camera for free. Unfortunately, I no longer have it, as I sold it for €5. Shit.

Things To Be Thankful For

On this cold winter night in East Cork, there is really only one thing I need be thankful for.



Friends. Without them, nothing else really matters.

I kind of wanted to leave that post there. End it with that one line. But I can't.

In two short months, Claire and I fly out to the unknown land of Canada.The undiscovered country of the future is one populated with no small amount of apprehension and fear, but also a lot of anticipation and excitement. Before us lies unlimited potential. But behind us lies all the friends we have in Ireland.

My friends have always been important to me. As a Gemini, I'm supposed to be my own best friend, capable of entertaining myself when alone. And my hyperactive imagination and ability to MacGyver toys out of any old rubbish means that generally I can. But I don't like to. I prefer to be around other people. I love being in the company of my friends. As much as I enjoy my job, my favourite day of the week is Sunday, when I get to hang out with everyone for a few hours.

Leaving them all behind is going to hurt. A lot. I know I'm going to miss my mom. I know I'll be homesick as soon as we touchdown in Vancouver, if not as soon as we lift off from Dublin! I know the thought of being so far away will be both thrilling and terrifying. But I know more than that that I will be sick with grief over leaving my friends. No Sunday breakfast, no Rock Band 3 parties, no boardgame afternoons.

And so, I cease waffling on and give thanks to you, the people who put up with me. You've made my 12 years in Cork a wonderful chapter of my life that I will never forget. You've been part of my life for almost half of my time on this earth.

Thanks.

A Sketchy Post

Two weeks ago I finally got to put up all my sketches from Comic Con 2008. My awesome sketchbook is one of my most prized possessions, and filled with incredible art and signatures from the most amazing people. As well as the complete Flickr Set, I also created a nifty video showcasing the sketches, for my own pleasure.

Preschool Teacher By Day, Movie Editor By Night

As we reach the end of another school year, I find myself once more stressing out over things I know will be fine and work out easily in the end. Mostly, it's the video we put together using all the photos we took during the year to show parents all the work their kids did and how utterly adorable they are. Except... well... go back and read the last sentence, starting at "mostly" and replace "we" with "I".

I've done this every year that I've been working in the preschool, and every year I run into new problems. The first year it was all the teething issues. Video files not playing nice with the software, having to find appropriate codex's to edit proprietary video camera movie files (oh, while I'm on that subject: Fuck you Sony), recording too much background noise and then having to try to clean up the audio as best I could, and many, many more. The second year was more of the same, but with the added stress of having to one-up myself from the previous year, coupled with how attached to the group I had gotten. It was the first time I had to let go kids I had been teaching for two years, and they were an amazing bunch of kids.

This years problems started and finished with Windows Movie Maker. In past years I have had the luxury of using advanced, expensive, professional and complicated software to help edit or re-encode the video. This year, however, may be the last year that I do this, if plans fall into place (See future blog), and the preschool manager wants to be able to do this herself next year. The preschool manager is, however, very computer illiterate, and advanced, expensive, professional and complicated software to help edit or re-encode the video is far, far beyond her abilities.

So I decided to limit myself to three programs.  The bulk of the work was done between Movie Maker, Windows free built-in basic movie editing tool, and Picasa, the awesome, free and simple-to-use photo editing tool. Let it be said here that I love Picasa. It is far from a professional tool, but it's great for the amateur photographer who doesn't really care too much about the final product. And it can produce very slick looking video compilations of your photos in a widely accepted format with zero hassle. But enough ass-kissing, back to the point. The third and final program was a simple and free video converter program I needed to convert the video files we shot using the camcorder from a proprietary video format to a Movie Maker readable format (once again: Fuck you Sony).

I could do everything I needed to do, and in record time, using only these three programs. AVC would re-encode what I needed to, Picasa would put each sections set of photographs together into a beautifully presented clip, and then Movie Maker would add the soundtrack and produce a single, 12 minute long movie to be shown on this Friday. Except... It didn't.

No matter how often I tried, Movie Maker would not produce a movie. It got to 25% every time and then froze, the "Estimated time remaining" figure slowly climbing upwards as no further progress was had. After three failed attempts at getting it to work, I eventually produced each section individually. Picasa had produced three photo compilations for me, and those, along with the video segment of the children talking about what they want to be when they grow up, meant I had four sections that needed a music track. So I produced four segments of photos with soundtrack in Movie Maker, each one working perfectly, then I put them all together and produced a completed movie. I have no idea why Movie Maker refused to edit the segments together and put the soundtrack on at the same time, but happily edit the four segments with the soundtrack pre-attached without complaint.

Either way, it's all done. I set the whole thing up and showed it to the preschool manager today and we both got all teary-eyed. That's why I don't have my projector or Xbox here tonight and instead I have time to blog. They're in school waiting for Friday. I would normally wait until Thursday to bring all that stuff up, but I'm going to a friends wedding tomorrow instead. Two days left in school, and I take one off! Ha!

Destined For Obsurity?

Young enthusiasm. Where do you think their future will lead them?

Do you think they knew where they were going when this was taken?

Photos, Fotos, Phfotoz

During my controversial exile from the land of crystal clear data streams and radiating rays of information, I did have a chance to start organising, tagging and writing little paragraphs for more photos from the Epic Holiday(TM) of 2008. My Flickr stream now has an amazing nine pages of new photos, from the baseball games we saw to walking around San Diego, driving a Corvette to Vegas and back, and Star Trek.

I have tonnes more to post, and hope to make a further dent in my backlog soon. As well as older photos, I really want to start posting some newer stuff as well, including a photo tour of our new place.

Soon, soon, soon!

What Is Worse Than One Of Me?

Six of me! In one room!! Crazy!


Lots of Photoshopping here, obviously! Not very well done, just took lots of photos of me in various places around the room using the tripod, then used the lasso tool to carefully cut each of the clones out and paste them into a single image. It shouldn't be hard to work out which clone belongs to the full background. Things look great until you blow it up and start looking closer. But I'm just nit-picking! For a first attempt, self taught, with no masking or other neat PS trickery, it's not bad at all!

Finally, Some Me Time

It's been almost a full month since I last updated, and it's been a busy month! Preschool work kicked into overdrive in the run up to Christmas, and I've been putting in extra time at home on arts ideas for the class, as well as buying supplies in town. My other work has had me in for more hours, both in the health food store and the comic shop. This is great, because I really need the money! Rent this month is on the credit card!

And on top of all this, I got a new game for the Wii, and an Xbox 360! The Xbox was a Christmas present from Claire, and I bought the games for it myself through ebay. In fact, most of my Christmas shopping was done through ebay! Sweet!

Edit: Oops! Silly me. I almost talked about what I got people, before realising that some of them read this!! Heh. Anyway...

But tonight I have a little time to say hello to the world wide web again, and blog a little. Poor Flickr is still feeling cold. I haven't really taken any photos at all recently, even of action figures. I guess I'm allowed take a break now and then, but I really want to get back into it. Maybe in the New Year. I'm not going to make a resolution to photograph or blog more though. I feel I did a lot this year, certainly more than I expected to do, given my reputation for starting and ending things with reckless abandon! Still, hopefully I'll have time to blog a bit more before the end of 2007.

Self Education: Photoshop

Yesterday I learned some more of the joys of Photoshop, and put together the image you see above. In doing so, I had the opportunity to learn a bunch of new skills, as well as take time out from my study, which is, I have to admit, beginning to melt my brain!

To be honest, this whole thing started as a neat, simple idea that quickly spiralled out of control. Originally it was just going to be Spidey sending his birthday wishes to a Flickr pal, but then I thought to add a party of friends. Then the idea of a handmade banner cropped up, and I played around with that for a bit.

Once I had a group set up and ready to shoot, I realised that Giant Sized Spidey didn't have a place to be, so I sketched out the basics of what I thought might work. He was then photographed separately against a green screen and removed from his own background to be placed in this image. This meant learning how to use masks, something I'd never tried before but was aware of.

Once Draft One was complete, I didn't like the text on the banner, so all of it was photoshopped out and brand new text was drawn into it on the computer! That had to be blurred, filtered, and have a little noise added to make it look smooth and part of the image as a whole. All new features to me again!

Draft Two complete, I realised Spidey now kinda just hung there, so I needed a frame. After going nuts trying to figure out how to just make a simple straight line and then put a curve in it, I almost gave up. Then I remembered about something called OOB (Out Of Bounds) a friend had used and looked that up, which taught me how to do the frame. A few minor adjustments and I was nearly there.

Thankfully I had learnt my lessons on layers from a previous project, so almost every element of the image was on separate layers, making it easy to have Spidey and the banner overlapping the frame!! But that brought up a new issue! You see, in the photo of Spidey I used, part of his left elbow was cut off. Originally I didn't mind it, as it was outside the viewing area of the image in early drafts, but now that I had added the frame, he needed to have a complete arm.

To solve this, I had to use another of the photos I had taken of Spidey against the green screen that did have the elbow but was an inferior picture. I cropped the needed part, dropped out the background using my newly acquired masking skills and grafted the missing piece onto the large image. Smudge tool and careful blurring made the area of surgery seamless! If I hadn't included this paragraph, I doubt any of you would notice the work unless you really went looking for it. It's a tiny thing, but possibly the one I'm most proud of for what I had to do and how it turned out.

A little cleaning up here and there and I was done! I'm really proud of this. Yes, I started it for my friends birthday, but I have to admit, I finished it for myself! The weird thing is, I've never met Fengschwing in real life! I only know him through Flickr. Ah, the joys of the internet!

Go check out the image in it's full, gloriously uncompressed resolution to criticise my work with confidence!

Frozen Moments

Not only does May 2nd mean the first anniversary of my blogging exploits, but it is also marks the end of the first year of my Flickr account! And what a year it's been! To celebrate, I did a cool Flickr photo mosaic using a selection of images from the newest to the first few put up!

I hope you enjoy.
1. Friends, 2. Looking The Worse For Wear, 3. Images in Flame, 4. Shane in Sombrero, 5. Spider-Man?!?, 6. Andrea & I, 7. Looming Over, 8. Too Much Blue, 9. Just The Two Of Us, 10. Look Out! Cat!, 11. Hopi, 12. All Business, 13. Watching, 14. Me, 15. Three Daves, 16. See That..., 17. Friends 2006, 18. Hi!, 19. Classic Pose, 20. Cotton Wool Landscape, 21. The Touristy Shot, 22. Squish, 23. Sandy Dune, 24. Claire and Panda, 25. Picnic In The Park, 26. Noel, 27. Mirror Image, 28. Bring It On, Little Man, 29. Buster And Me, 30. To the Left, 31. Finger Puppets on the Moon, 32. Blink And You'll Be Missed, 33. Resting On The Lawn, 34. Through The Looking Glass, 35. Under Attack, 36. Debating World Politics

52 Weeks One Hero

Hi there, folks! Your friendly neighbourhood web-blogger here, taking over from Denis for a post. It wasn't that hard either. He leaves his account logged in, fool. All I had to do was wait until he was out and nab the keyboard!

Anyway, in his last post he talked about this whole 52 Weeks thing he's doing. Well, that inspired me to do something similar, but I figured having me turn up in the same group might not be the best idea. People might get annoyed. So I thought to myself, there are tonnes of action figures of little old me in the world, as well as tonnes of figures of lesser heroes. Surely there is somewhere that hosts portraits of toys! And sure enough there is.

Plastic 52 is all about respecting the little guy. Or gal, or monster, or car, or robot, or carobot, but you get the picture. So I joined up Denis' Flickr account to that too (he leaves that logged in as well! Will he never learn?). I've posted my first image, which, in the hopes of calming Denis down when he finds out what I've done, has him in it too.

So if any of you loyal readers have cool toys you might like to share with the world, come join us! It's a new group, so everyone's really friendly with everyone right now, which is great.

Anyway. I'm off to read some more Ultimate me. Did you know I'm dating Kitty Pryde in that universe? Man. I wish I could date Kitty Pryde. I wish I could date.

See ya in the funny pages!

52 Weeks One Person

I don't think I've mentioned here already that I'm jealous of anyone that can take self portraits. I mean, just look at these from Bob, Cian, Karen and Sharon, all good friends, all flaunting their talent in my face! Curses! And you know what's sickening about most of these? They're untouched, presented as snapped. That's all natural awesomeness! Gah!!

Now admittedly, my dislike of my own self portraits is in part due to the fact that I'm not a big fan of looking at photos of myself, but it's also true that I don't feel that I have a great eye for photography. That said, self portraits can be amazing, and seeing a bunch together is always nice. The best, in my opinion, are the ones that just look natural. Not posed, not set up. Just grabbing a camera and snapping a great picture. I don't think I can do that.

With this in mind, I want to introduce you all to a Flickr Group called 52 Weeks. It's a group of users on Flickr that are taking one self-portrait a week and adding them to that group, or adding their favourite if they take more. There's another group that is trying to get daily self portraits, 365 in a year, but that's a bit much for me. 52 sounds far more reasonable.

As I said, I know some of my friends and readers do awesome self-portraits, so I thought people might like to contribute. I'm going to be trying it myself, starting today. One photo a week can't be that hard to do, can it?!? I mean, even if I don't like 99% of the images of myself I take, I've got seven whole days to find that 1%.

Anyway. Have a look at some of the contributions already and see what you think. Some are great, some are good, but they're all interesting.

Just A Comment

If I have you as a Flickr Contact, then you've probably noticed that I spent some time this morning commenting on photos I liked, as well as building up my Favourites section.

I just figure I need to start acknowledging things I like and giving credit where credit is due.

On that basis, I've started to make an effort to keep up with peoples blogs and Flickrs and add comments if I think of something.

Moo! Moo I Tell You!

Way back when I started this blog thing, I developed a nasty (some might say, "stalker-like") habit of copying Cian. He started a blog, I started a blog. He got a Flickr account, I got a Flickr account. Well, that's it really. But they happened close together...

Anyway, I realised about a week ago that I hadn't done anything to copy him recently, so I started thinking. Move to Dublin? Nah. Too many toys to move house now. Grow some facial hair? Tried it. Didn't work. I'll post the results soon enough. Work in the computer industry? Eh. No. Start taking lots of really cool, quality photos? That would require talent, time, effort and drive. I suffer from a chronic lack of all of these things.

What ever could I do?

And then I remembered Cian showing me these! Moo Cards. He had gotten a set and showed me them. They were really nice. Granted, he had great images to start with, but the cards were so cute, and I really wanted them. Plus, they accept PayPal, and I had some credit in my account, so it wasn't even going to cost me anything (hush, I'm trying to justify to myself buying these when I can't afford to eat! Be quiet)!

Anyway, long story short, with the blessing and help of Claire I picked ten images out of the 500 plus photos I have up on my Flickr account to turn into Moo cards and sent off the order through the wonder of digital transfer systems.

They arrived back today through the slightly less wonderful snail-mail postal services. They came out really cool, as you can see. I have more up on Flickr. If you would like me to send you one, send me a message, either through this blog, my Flickr account, or if you know my email address, use that!! I can't guarantee I'll get it to you immediately. I can't afford food, so stamps are kinda low on the priority scale right now!

Anyway. That's it for now. Later!

More Pictures, More Updates

I posted a bunch of new photos on Flickr today, but also played with some of the new additions to the site that they have introduced since last I tried tampering with my sets and layout.

New photos include food, friends and funny stuff. And I have two Collections now as well, Toys and BBQ, making use of the brand new feature.

Flickr continues to prove it's awesomeness, and I still love it. It's already been worth ever cent I spent on it, and I have another year to go before I have to renew it, so that's great!!

Photography

While I was wandering to my morning lecture I spotted a wealth of opportunities to get some really nice photographs. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me. In future, I'm going to try to start carrying my digital camera where-ever I go, maybe just have it in my bag at all times. I'd like to get more into photography, and with Cian, Karen and Jonathon all thinking the same, it would be a good time to do so. We could compare and contrast, learning from each other.

I'm not going to buy the crazy expensive equipment the guys have. Their cameras could get me a lot of action figures!! Besides, I like my camera. It takes some great shots, and does what I want it to do.

I simply have to try harder. Put in an effort to see my surroundings. Stop photographing toys.