Posted by Andrew
Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:59:00 GMT
I’ve found recently that trawling Flickr for gems is really fun. It sort of reminds me of the old days when I spent hours browsing DeviantArt for cool pictures to print out and stick on my wall. The problem with Flickr, which is a problem which will plague any site where users contribute content of any kind, is signal to noise ration. The amount of good shots one finds on Flickr is massively outweighed by the amount of crap you find. I don’t even think that that’s me being snobbish.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people should have to do a course in photography before being allowed to use Flickr. I’m just noting a problem I’ve seen. I don’t believe there is any real solution. The explore pages on Flickr are nice, but they lead to some really great shots being missed, and I’ll be honest, I love finding a great shot before it makes explore. I have, however found one way of browsing Flickr which tends to find me shots I’ll like more often, and that is searching by tag.
Now, folksonomy (or free tagging) isn’t a new concept, but I had never really thought of it as a good way to browse Flickr. My traditional approach has always been to browse the latest photos, hoping to find a gem. Foolish, I know. Anyhow, by searching for certain tags, I’ve found a considerably improved Signal to Noise Ration (or SNR). I’ve found that people who are more serious about their photos are more likely to tag with technical or artistic terms. While I did have issues when searching for candid, searching for DOF, Contrast, gritty, even using a tag cluster for people improved my results. Of course, there will always be noise, and that’s what irritates me.
When you tag something with contrast, you are suggesting that you have used contrast for artistic effect, not that the highlights of the photo are so blown out (white) that the photo has lost all detail. Similarly, DOF (which stands for depth of field, which describes the size of the area of the shot which is in focus) is not a tag for photos when you missed the focal point… Yes, you did have problems with the DOF, but you didn’t use it to create artistic effect. Finally, gritty does not mean enough grain in the photo to feed a small African nation.
So my one ask is that if you do free-tag things, that you think about what the tags you are using actually mean. It’s not too hard :)
And now, after that unpleasantness, enjoy 13 more Flickr favourites:
- colored fingers(Centre)
agnes
- Slot
- María Miramar
- P5285026 copy
- _MG_2545
- be my light in the dark
- fidget
- Askance
- Mobster
- dihaines
- 000021-1.JPG
- For Freezing
Tags flickr, flickr favs, folksonomy, free tagging, photography, rants | no comments
Posted by Andrew
Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:34:00 GMT
Something has come up over the last few days which has truly shaken my perception of the internet populace. Every now and then, things like this happen, like the Kathy Sierra saga, but for some reason, I’m never really ready.
I’ve just started looking around at candid photography, as apart from gig photography, its a style I find challenging and enjoyable. Candid pictures, of friends, or of strangers generally have more life and personality than posed ones, and they seem to capture more of who the person is. They are also considerably more difficult to get right. People tend to balk when they see a camera, especially one that looks semi-professional. I’ve found the key is, that if people do notice you with a camera, then make light of it and then be patient and wait for them to get bored of making a fuss, or for them to forget about it. Once they’re relaxed, that’s the time you’ll get your best shots.
I don’t have a great deal of candid stuff I’m willing to release. I’m still learning, and some of the best moments have had horrific noise issues. A lot of my work is with a long lens, either my 90-300mm or the 70-200mm when I can get my hands on it. That tends to creep people a little but for me, it’s about getting out of their faces. Most of my favourite shots are from the time I spent shooting at Hyde park on Australia day.
Now what is it that disturbs me? That when I search for “candid” on flickr, among the crappy pictures of people pulling faces, and looking the wrong way and the few gems, were a bunch of shots of women’s posteriors, shot unawares along with women’s feet, and women on the beach, similarly shot without the subjects’ knowledge. Now, my candid stuff is sometimes without the subjects’ knowledge, but never is it designed to objectify the subject, or to allow others to gain gratification from their physical features.
What’s more creepy is that the whole upskirt genre, which was brought to public knowledge through this year’s Australian Open and the fact that it has found a place on Flickr. Now, sometimes a photographer might catch a bad angle which does reveal more than it should, it is the photographer’s responsibility to his subjects and his peers that he should delete that photo. It’s what I have had to do on a couple of occasions. It’s embarrassing, and one of the reasons I don’t really like showing people my photos before I go through them, sometimes you just time it wrong. People who intentionally go for these shots make me sick.
That aside, real candid photography is fun, and difficult. Getting the right moment, that combination of expression, movement and x-factor is something which I don’t think will ever become boring, and the results speak for themselves.
Tags candid, candid photography, flickr, photography, rants | 1 comment
Posted by Andrew
Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:53:21 GMT
To call me a nerd is probably pretty fair. Actually, I don't know about that. I can't work out quite whether I'm a geek or a nerd. I'm also not sure where the distinction between the two lies. I had a look around and found differing responses here (Mouse Words, blog), here (Twilight Universe, blog), and here (Slashdot, technology news site). I'm still not convinced, but here are a few thoughts of mine:
I've always thought of myself as a geek, rather than a nerd. I don't know exactly why, but nerd has more of a negative connotation to me. I have reasonable social skills, and I don't think I break in to nerdiness too much when I'm having a conversation with mere mortals, however, if I meet another geek, then it's on for young and old. For example, after Devotion one Saturday night, we went out for pizza (gourmet pizza from Tyrone's, don't worry :D) and everything was normal. Murray, one of the guys who was there is a web designer by trade, and somehow we got talking about XHTML and Ruby on Rails and how most MySpace profiles that look half decent are dirty hacks. That moment has lived on in the minds of those there to such a point that when I met one of the other guys who was there at the pub the other night, he was very excited to tell me he was learning XHTML.
See, there was a point to that story, other than proving that I do leave the house on occasion. From one meeting, that guy had me pinned as a geek, through a bit of innocent nerd talk. But there I go, mixing terms. Interesting, isn't it? I call myself a geek, but call what I do “nerding it up” and “nerd talk” as well as “assorted geekery”. Are the terms interchangeable? I'd still like to thing they aren't. As a descriptor of a person, geek is quite separate from nerd. A geek definitely has the social skills and is generally willing to talk on another level, appropriate to an occasion, but my on occasion lapse back into technical speak. A nerd however, is more defined by their social interactions. If they think a LUG meeting, or Warhammer meet, or LAN party is the pinnacle of their social life, someone is a major nerd.
Of course, there is a blurring of the lines. For some bizarre reason, some of my friends have decided that post high-school (and the accompanying exams, which are all we have left!), they want to get heavily into Warhammer. Now, they on occasion give me crap for being a geek, and of course, are often justified in that. Of course, they were now entering what I consider nerd-dom... In my mind, Warhammer is for twelve-year-olds and of course, GIANT NERDS! Of course this idea was thrown back in my face when I put it forward. Such is life ;)
Onto the whole matter of the label, irrelevant of which one you use. I don't particularly like being boxed by a label. I don't mind it if I have just finished a diatribe about how a VLAN based restructure of the school network is necessary because of the fact that we have very minimal edge security, and that authentication to the edge is necessary to prevent rogue machines if you call me a name, but if it's a general pattern then things get fun. If there's one thing my ex was good at, it was finding and highlighting my insecurities. She decided it was fun to, whenever I mentioned something at all technical, to call me a nerd. Suffice to say, things didn't end well there. That wasn't the reason, but I'm sure it didn't help.
So basically what I'm trying to say (and spent a great deal of time discussing aimlessly) is that I don't mind sometimes being called a geek, or even a nerd on special occasions, but I absolutely loathe being defined by one of those terms. I will quite happily engage with people, but I also enjoy the mental stimulation of the technical things that I do. Don't box me in because of that.
Tags geekery, rants | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Andrew
Tue, 03 Oct 2006 20:13:00 GMT
I do actually have a proper post in mind, but this is something which I need to address while it’s fresh in my mind. I just got home from a night out with the guys (Indian, then coffee then a couple of hours just chatting) and went to check my RSS feeds. Nothing really special to begin with, just the usual crap on digg, the weirdities on Boing Boing, then I got to this post on Airbag Industries, Greg Storey’s personal blog. I was impressed.
I have to be honest, I got into this whole blogging thing for a bunch of the wrong reasons. I kind of wanted to anonymously vent my feelings, but I also wanted a web presence for my real world personality, and I suppose I just wanted to feel like people were reading what I had to say. Now, there are a lot of reasons which could be worse than that, but suffice to say, that isn’t why I’m still blogging.
What Greg says about “the old days” as I suppose they are now, while as he willingly admits is through rose tinted glasses is very true:
Before there were blogs we had websites. Beautiful, random websites that felt more like a zine — one page looking nothing like the one before or after it — or Wired magazine back in the early days when Jane Metcalf was art directing. Clicking through a website hosted on Geocities was like playing Russian roulette with your eyes but today those horrid pages with disco backgrounds, flaming horizontal rules, and BLINK tags would look more like art today than poorly designed website because we’re so used to seeing boxy newsletters (this site included).
I do actually remember those days. Now days we’re sucked in by all this social networking and such, but I think it is again time to break away from that. So many casual bloggers are writing to get ads, or to get hits or to get on the digg front page, or to fit in or writing to get linked to. I did this once and it needs to end.
Part of why I haven’t posted in a while is because I haven’t felt I had something worth posting about. I don’t feel like I have much to put out there in the way that The World According to Chuz does. I can’t just vent my feelings to the world, because I’m not exactly sure what I feel (this irritates more than a few people). I don’t have fantastic epiphanies, or technical ideas to post. I haven’t got very far with DIY or music or whatever, and I don’t feel qualified to publicly critique music (although if you ask me, I’ll quite happily privately critiquing it).
As you can see, however, I will quite happily write about what I get fired up about. That’s what blogging should be about. Now it could be that only a couple of my loyal fans actually read this far into this post (I know I might be quite bored by this point if I hadn’t had two coffees tonight :P) but I don’t think that phases me that much.
I’m not writing this for any other reason than that I think it clicks with me. It represents me. That’s what I want to write. I read blogs for a lot of different reasons. I have a couple that I read just because I like the writing style. Some I like for the content. I don’t know why you’re here reading this, but that doesn’t matter too much to me any more.
Does this mean that I don’t want a greater readership or to be on the front page of digg or to see hundreds of thousands of hits? No. I’m still a human, with an ego which doesn’t mind a little bit of support, but I don’t want that to dominate my writing. I don’t know what I *do* want to dominate my writing, but I know it shouldn’t be any of those things above.
I want to write because I can, and that’s what I’m going to do.
Tags rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Andrew
Wed, 03 May 2006 14:40:00 GMT
The next month is going to go bananas for me. Really. I worked the dates out. It will be exactly a month. Most of that tasty yellow fruit will be thanks to the musical which our school is holding. I’m doing sound ops, probably for my second last year. I really do enjoy doing it, but sometimes it can be a real pain. I love the problem solving, the thinking on my feet, and I especially love having an answer for everything, but sometimes the “creatives” have a habit of getting in the way of that.
First off, don’t get me wrong, I like artists, I’d like to think on odd occasions I’m artistic, but I also like to think I don’t make other people’s lives hard in the process. This year, it’s been worse than I’ve ever seen it. I mean, I’ve done some interesting gigs, for a 17 year-old, I’ve done a lot. Last year I went from James Morrison to Narcotics Anonymous.
Musicals just knock the whole thing up a notch or two. In my experience actors are prissy and self centred at the best of times, but now add a bunch of hormones and teen angst, and remove a bunch of professionalism and then you’ve got a school musical.
Over the next few weeks or so, I intend to let you into my little world. I’ll have some wireless access at school, so I may even be able to post some very up-to-the-minute commentary during the thick of it.
I was going to start ranting about this year’s musical here and now, but for now I’ll just give you a hint on the people I’m working with through a story from two years ago:
It was our final dress rehearsal. All the cast were used to using mics now, and all had been lectured with what I call the mic talk. It’s goes something like this: “Once it is on (And it will be put on by a mic tech, not you or your similarly incompetent friends), do not touch it. Do not touch the mic pack, do not touch the mic itself. Do not fiddle with the tape, the cable or anything. Adjust your costume around it as carefully as possible. Do not sing or talk into another castmember’s mic at any time.” It’s really longer than that, and more flowery, but you get the jist.
I was running the desk which involves manually checking the audio from the radio mics 5 minutes before the show, then visually checking right the way through. I had done all my checks and everything was good. Second line of the show, no audio from one of the narrators. I went into a frenzy trying to find the fault, we had full signal, no audio. I got on the comms and got one of my mic techs to check it out. Stupid girl had turned off the audio switch on her pack. Apparently she didn’t trust me not to snoop on her conversations.
After that rehearsal, we had to convince the cast that I wasn’t about to grossly invade their privacy, and I would only manually check 5 minutes out from the start of the show, and only for a split second, to check that the audio was good. For good measure, we taped all the audio switches to the ON position, just to make sure there was no doubt which way the switch should be.
Along comes the matinee. Second line… NO AUDIO. I almost die. Again I send a mic tech in. The stupid girl has UNPLUGGED her mic from the pack. Some of you may think it came undone or something…. Nope. That thing requires you to twist it while pushing two bits on the side. After having a few words with her, it didn’t happen again.
After reading this, you might think I’m arrogant and not really good with people… I’d tend to disagree. While I sound nasty here, I’m nice to people even when I’m angry, to a point. I keep my cool on the outside, and I don’t really express too much of my frustration to anyone until it’s all done.
Tags actors, anecdotes, audio, cast, microhphones, mixing, musicals, rants | 4 comments | no trackbacks
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