Category: Photography

Thoughts, experiments and endeavors with the lens.

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Geo Tagging

Flickr Maps

It’s no secret that I think flickr is one of the best things the internet has to provide. A few months back they got better by adding geo-tagging maps. It’s a mashup between Yahoo Maps (a rip off of Google Maps) and its own API.

Although it has some privacy issues for cameras that automatically GeoTag their photos, it’s a windfall for people who see a great photo or even a lousy photo of a great place and want to explore more in depth.

For example, someone takes a picture of a great plating of food at a restaurant. You see that photo and think… that would be fun to go to … and now you know where it is, too.

A year ago you had to use terse tools which created machine tags in your photos – those were messy and unstable. Now that it’s been solid in Flickr for half a year it’s worth noting how simple and solid geo-tagging can be.

The only complaint I have is that Yahoo doesn’t always report the correct location in your photo details, but it still shows up fine on the map.

So every public photo taken at a specific location other than my house has been geo-tagged for your enjoyment.

Check out what others have Geo-Tagged.

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The creative photographer

Where there are thousands of fantastic photographers there are hundreds of thousands of amateurs who have taken fantastic photographs. I’ve had to think a bit lately about what separates the two. Some very well established photographers have posted work up on Flickr or on their personal site that I thought – ehhh, that’s okay. Likewise, some very average photographers have posted some striking photos on Flickr that draw my admiration.

What is it that gives a photo that “WOW” factor? I think it’s the ability to give notice to things and move us by visuals that nearly everyone else takes for granted. It is also the ability to tell a story in a unique way, such as Carl Iwasaki’s famous photo of teenagers going steady. Sometimes it’s an unexpected gamble that produces a photograph, like Phitar’s photo: salomé spinning. Sometimes it’s just seeing a detail in the environment that others overlook.

I could try to imitate, but that only takes me as far as being a good imitator. It seems that in photography, using a fresh approach is what gives any shot the potential. That frustrates me because I feel so stale – writer’s-block, inhibition, whatever you wish to call it.

Joseph O. Holmes’ gallery of photos of people staring at African veldt dioramas is an extraordinary example of a good artistic result. (These pictures somehow remind me of a related Ray Bradbury story.) It would be amazing to delve into his brain with a few questions: What made him think to do this series (AMNH)? Did he naturally envision the result and go for it, or did it strike him at the moment? Was he inspired to do this work, and if so, what inspired him? Is this an imitation of another piece of art that he’s seen? Whatever his answers might be to some of these questions, I think we can all agree that he well deserves the $650 a-piece that each of these photographs sell for.

Poughkeepsie Journal Article on Joseph O. Holmes

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Not Yet Flickr Favorites

Every once in a while I come up with what I think would be a totally cool idea. Maybe one out of twenty of those times do I actually spring for it.

Flickr is amazing. It’s API is moderately impressive, too. I thought: “What if I could go through all the tags of all my favorite photos up on flickr, ordered them by popularity, then did a search for photos that matched the top X tags in that list?”

I expected to discover some incredible art that would be right in line with what I already enjoyed. BTW – what is it that I enjoyed?

First, I discovered that flickr can only handle searches up to 20 tags. Any more than that and you get back zip – zilch – nada. Doesn’t matter if any photo in their database actually contains all 21 tags – you get nothing back.

Second, I discovered that some people out there have over 150 tags on the photos of which only 2 tags might apply. As a result, when searching by relevance you get these over-tagged photos in the list along with the worthy ones.

Blame the upload tools. They don’t ask the user to tag each photo, but rather to list out all the tags used for the batch of photos being uploaded. Non-savvy users might batch upload a photograph of a donkey and another of a stop sign. Given only one box for all photos to list their tags they would enter something that places stop-sign related tags on the donkey and vice-versa.

All the same – try the tool out, it actually does a shot-gun result of what I hoped for. Try sorting by “interestingness, descending” for the most polished works first, then try the others for works that are “sleepers” (fantastic photos that are uploaded while people are dozing off, and therefore rarely discovered).

Not Yet Flickr Favorites